Taminos Trick

Tamino has his crowd all whipped up about sea ice. He has done two posts now declaring how stupid I, Anthony Watts, and by association, all of you, are. Sorry folks, it was a drive-by incident! For him, I’m not enough of a believer and for others, I’m too much. Is it is a good sign when you get it from all angles? Either way, he has made deliberately erroneous claims in an attempt to discredit this blog, and WUWT, which I suppose means we have struck a nerve.

The first thing I would like to clarify is my opinion on sea ice in general. Like many readers here, I have read a large number of papers on the topic, unlike most, I have also taken the time to download and plot satellite Sea Ice data, replicated the trends and examined sea ice on a regional basis. With help, I have identified evidence of minor trend inducing error and will soon be looking at how the online satellite data is knitted together during transitions. From all of these many hours of time, I’m completely unconvinced that man made global warming is causing very much of the observed sea ice decline. I’m also willing to be wrong but the literature appears to support that a substantial portion of the Northern hemisphere decline is caused by a weather pattern change in the Arctic. This opinion is reasonably standard in the mainstream although it is often mixed with the claim that warming weakened the ice and allowed it to flow out of the polar region. The possibility that warming or weather are primary causes of the declining sea ice creates a need for disaggregation. Of course the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive so there is a lot of room for some combination of a variety of factors to be the cause. We also know that something the believers often conveniently forget is that not all warming is CO2 based.

So with all of that said, I don’t think that the effect man is having on the globe is detectable in the ice trend. Detectable being statistically differentiable. That is very different from whether a trend can be detected or whether a trend is caused by natural warming. In his recent two posts, Tamino (aka Dr. Grant Foster) mixes everything together in what has been a successful attempt to whip up his followers. Unlike the Air Vent and WUWT, his crowd is comprised primarily of non-technical readers who often jump at any statement they can find with literally zero understanding of why or what they are attacking.

So, if you have a region like the Arctic, where sea ice is often, but not always, multi-year and that ice is being affected by being either pushed out of the region and melting, simply warming and melting or some combination, and you want to understand the trend in ice levels for the globe caused by surface temperature warming, then disambiguation of the effects is necessary. Therefore measuring ice which melts completely and re-forms annually should provide a cleaner temperature signal than a region reacting to something else.

To that end I made the plot below from gigabytes of satellite data which identified 72 degrees North Latitude as the line where multi-year ice is nearly non-existent. Layman Lurker confirmed this latitude independently (and with less effort) before I finished. Now “nearly non-existent” is different from “completely non-existent” but not by much (see how that works!). Engineers and scientists often approximate things but some in Tamino’s crowd show their inexperience and called this as an error despite having no evidence.

So I then added up all of the single year sea ice south of 72 North latitude in the Northern and Southern hemisphere, plotted all of it including the pole-hole part left out, and referred to it as global single year ice. Unfortunately, the global ice didn’t have enough trend for Tamino (wasn’t quite 95% significant) and he completely wigged. (“Wigged”, is a psychiatric term used to describe the reaction of believers when they discover something is unhelpful to the “cause”. ) What he did to “fight back” was misrepresent the work and show a ridiculous annual refreeze plot in the North region implying that somehow that is equivalent. That was Grant Fosters trick on his readers, who were unwilling or unable to point out the deception. Several of them fell for it completely and their acerbic comments went uncorrected by Grant.

The north pole is a trapped region which freezes “nearly” completely every year. As multi-year ice vanishes, there is an increase in available open sea area and single year ice area naturally increases. Therefore if you want to isolate the effect of temperature on sea ice from weather effects on North polar ice, it is counterproductive to include anything from that region.

I have spent about an hour and a half now processing the data to see how well each region correlates to UAH NH temperatures. I took the entire NH temperature and correlated it to Northern hemisphere sea ice South of 72 degrees North latitude and sea ice North of 72 degrees. Of course, since we are using ICE, it is preferable to use only ice and temperatures from months where northern ice is present. I chose Jan – September from the video but it was pretty arbitrary. An estimate again! OMG.

Correlation of ice area to NH temperature:
South of 72 – 0.692
North of 72 – 0.593

So sea ice south of 72 correlated better to the NH temperature than that North of 72. It appears that the ice I’ve chosen is a better indicator of NH temp than ice north of that point. Of course it covers a lot more land mass than the other ice but it again confirms that the satellite sensors are measuring a real warming and the high correlation (for climate science) indicates that warming is having an impact on ice melt. It also confirms that the disaggregation of the data may not be worthless after all.

Lets see what Tamino’s crowd had to say about our collective stupidity-for daring to plot data:

“What Condon’s essay really illustrates is how fake skeptics fool themselves into thinking they have real evidence.”
“It’s my opinion that people like Jeff Condon are actually enemies of liberty.”
“It’s simple bootstrapping – it’s deliberate misinformation.”
“I cannot read much of Watts and other deniers – because too quickly I realize I am arguing with idiots. ”
“Thanks very much for exposing this breathtaking piece of idiocy.”
“Every time I think I’ve finally become cynical enough to no longer be surprised by denier lies, something like this comes along and proves me wrong.”
“Watts’ comment was obvious. After all, he’s paid to say he’s not concerned. ”
“This is typical of deniers. You start with the answer you want and then torture the data until you get enough evidence to believe it.”
“There is absolutely nothing justifiable from a scientific perspective in the ways Condon slices and dices the data”
“Cherry picking data to come to a conclusion the you already believed to be true, is the prime example of being a denier and not an honest skeptic.”
“Jeff Condon is anti-innovation, pure and simple.”
“Jeff is a moron.”
“Jeff got as close to the poles as he could without people noticing he was egregiously cheating.”

And that all is from the FIRST post. Tamino, who I believe realized his trick made him look bad, put up another post quickly attacking an older piece where I dared point out that sea ice level reached ‘average’.

Just out of curiosity, Jeff: what is that “Tamino’s trick” that you mention? The fact that he — correctly — pointed out that you ignore trend while touting yearly fluctuations? That’s actaully very reminiscent of the “no warming since 1998″ idiocy, you just cherry-pick much more aggresively.

jasonpettittsaid

The thing that is fundamentally significant about science proper and the scientific method is that it is a brilliant, robust philosophy. It has a proven, iterative mechanism for harnessing collective wisdom and reliably arriving at good, useful knowledge. It’s the disciplined process of publishing, review and repetition that is why science works and what gives it its value to society.

Making blog posts with graphs on is not a robust philosophy. There are no checks, no iteration, there is no self-correcting tendency. There is nothing to stop you from leading yourselves down the garden path ~ something that is fantastically easy to do.

Sadly, I’m probably Tamino’s only ‘non technical’ reader (whether that makes me his primary reader or not, I don’t know) – can I suggest that ‘reading a large number of papers’ might be where you’re going wrong. Papers are great and all, but they focus on minutiae. They won’t help you make out the wood for the trees.

Text books on the physics of climate are the best place to get started for a basic understanding of fundamental principles.

If you read a text book, you’ll learn that global, annual measures of sea ice extent – which seems to be the bee under your bonnet here – tell us nothing about climate. It’s the wrong metric to try and evaluate how ice is responding to warming and the wrong metric to tell us how ice influences warming.

The role of sea ice extent (a measure of Albedo) in influencing the Solar Radiation Budget is seasonal – the polar night effectively renders ice extent trivial for six months of the year – and because there are two hemispheres with opposite seasons, the regions must also be considered separately.

Fudging it all together into a homogeneous slop so you can’t differentiate summer, winter north and south is a fudge. Nothing more.

Science works. It’s accessible and great to engage with. It’s genuinely useful and a productive way to harness all that inquiry and analysis.

Welcome to the Air Vent. We share code and data here so people can check our work. The sea ice data is rather massive so it is one of the least popular work-along stuff. However, many of us are published in technical fields – see reader background above, and some of us are published in Climate Science. Ask Real Climate if I can publish.

“Fudging it all together into a homogeneous slop so you can’t differentiate summer, winter north and south is a fudge. Nothing more.” – you are completely wrong and like Grzegorz, an excellent example of Tamino’s readership. You claim you are non-technical yet come here to advise me on how to think technically while bashing this reasonable work – which shouldn’t take much checking.

for (i in 1979:2012)
{
maska=as.integer(substr(UAHa[,1],4,7))==i
maskb=as.numeric(UAHa[,2])<9
mask=maska&maskb
iceUAH[i-1978]=mean(NUAH[mask],na.rm=TRUE)
}
plot(iceUAH,main="Sea Ice Area vs Temperature Jan-Sept\nSea ice are is inverted and scaled",ylab="Degrees C")
smartlegend(x="left", y="top",c("UAH NH temperature to 82 lon","Sea Ice Area North of 72","Sea Ice Area South of 72"),text.col=c("black","red","green"))

Quiet Waterssaid

“Therefore measuring ice which melts completely and re-forms annually should provide a cleaner temperature signal than a region reacting to something else.

To that end I made the plot below from gigabytes of satellite data which identified 72 degrees North Latitude as the line where multi-year ice is nearly non-existent.”

How do you account for ice that “melts completely and re-forms annually” north of the 72 degree line?

After all “as multi-year ice vanishes, there is an increase in available open sea area and single year ice area naturally increases” so if you are looking at “global single year ice” then that will need to be included otherwise your metric is, by definition, not global.

Roger Caiazzasaid

Jasonpettitt tells us that that “global, annual measures of sea ice extent tell us nothing about climate. It’s the wrong metric to try and evaluate how ice is responding to warming and the wrong metric to tell us how ice influences warming.” Then he goes on to suggest that Jeff’s work is unnecessary because it does not matter in the scientific scheme of things.

My response is that this appeal to proper science and the scientific method overlooks one critical fact. Melting ice is used as justification for related policy. For example, New York State is currently implementing a regulation for new sources that effectively bans the use of coal and residual oil by setting a low carbon dioxide limit. The regulatory impact statement justifies the need for the regulation, in part, due to sea level rise and notes that “the major contributor to sea level rise is thermal expansion and melting of glaciers and ice sheets.” If the decrease in the arctic ice sheet is not significantly correlated with changing temperature, then it makes a policy difference.

Quiet Waters asks “How do you account for ice that “melts completely and re-forms annually” north of the 72 degree line?”

My understanding is that was the point. When we are making a trend for arctic ice relative to temperanture we don’t care what happens north of the 72 degree line because ice there is likely affected by things other than the current annual temperature. For example if it was colder more ice builds up and lingers for more than one annual cycle. If it is warmer, then less ice builds up and there is less ice even when it is colder and the annual cycle grows more. Over time the ice south of the 72 degree line makes a preferable trend of what is actually going on. If you disagree analyze the data north and make the case that it is a better trend indicator.

Jeff made his argument, provided the data so you can make your own analysis, and presented his results. You can disagree based on your interpretation but I do not believe that it is appropriate to disparage what he has done as is the case in Tamino’s blog comments.

Manniacsaid

KenMsaid

Hello Jeff, I’ve enjoyed reading some of your articles (not that I *didn’t* enjoy others – I’ve only read ‘some’!)
.
In the post titled “Single Year Global Sea Ice Shows Minimal Trend,” the first two charts (2003 and then 2011) are displayed. Am I interpreting them correctly when I say…in 2003 the single-year ice covered far greater area and lasted much longer than the 2011 single year ice?

Quiet Waterssaid

Roger Caiazza says “Over time the ice south of the 72 degree line makes a preferable trend of what is actually going on. If you disagree analyze the data north and make the case that it is a better trend indicator.”

I have no comment (yet) to make about the analysis. My comment is more based on Jeff’s claim to have a metric for global single year ice and that “measuring ice which melts completely and re-forms annually should provide a cleaner temperature signal”.

Jeff says himself that there are areas of single year ice above the 72 degree line, in fact the metric he uses for his cutoff at that point has little to do with single year ice – he “identified 72 degrees North Latitude as the line where multi-year ice is nearly non-existent”. Presence of multi-year ice does not equal lack of single-year ice.

If Jeff was to term the metric – “single-year sea ice south of 72 degrees North” then I would not have had to ask the question.

1. took publicly available cryosphere data,
2. found an (accelerating) downward trend using linear and quadratic regressions,
3. confronted this with “despite my belief in CO2 global warming’s effect, I really don’t believe it has had any scientifically discernible impact on sea ice. Nutin!!”

Sorry, but unless you can question any of the three above points, it looks like Jeff Condon made a fool of himself again, cherry-picking one datapoint that happenned to reach the average, while ignoring a clear 30-year trend, and attempting to draw conclusions about “scientifically discernible impact on sea ice” on that basis. I’m sure this is very hip behaviour in the denialosphere — we have numerous examples — but other than that, it won’t appeal even to high school kids.

Jeff Condonsaid

Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m a working man so can only handle one crazy post at a time. I’m not even sure I will address Tammie’s second post because it is only there to distract the crowd from his screw up.

CoRevsaid

To Tammy’s crowd let me pose this question. If Jeff shows that 2012 ice melts at 75N what would be your reaction.

Here let me help you. ARM WAVING SUPPORTING THE FINDINGS OF THE NEW METRIC IDENTIFIED TO JUDGE ICE MELTING!

Instead, since CG I & CG II the wagons are so closely circled we see desperation like Mann’s, Gleick’s and now Tammy’s to protect the message and keep the faithful in line. Also since the CGs some seeds of doubt have sprouted into published papers, and the “team” papers are being more closely reviewed.

C’mon aboard the skeptical wagon and review science with an open else that ole “denialist” tag will used against you.

Eric Andersonsaid

Jasonpettitt: “The thing that is fundamentally significant about science proper and the scientific method is that it is a brilliant, robust philosophy. It has a proven, iterative mechanism for harnessing collective wisdom and reliably arriving at good, useful knowledge. It’s the disciplined process of publishing, review and repetition that is why science works and what gives it its value to society. Making blog posts with graphs on is not a robust philosophy. There are no checks, no iteration, there is no self-correcting tendency.”

Yes, yes, science is wonderful and publication has an important place, particularly when the publication process is fair and open. You need to rethink, however, your paradigm in this new century. Blogs play an increasingly important role, where there is extremely open discussion, lots of iteration, and opportunity for quick update and self-correction (at least on blogs like Jeff’s, which I admit may be very different from warmist blogs you might frequent). Compared to the traditional publication process, there is a lot more “science” that can be done in a short time in blogs. Where do you think Mann’s statistical screw-ups were first brought to light? How about Steig’s Antarctica blunder? Hansen’s outrageous scare predictions on sea level rise? Quality blogs play an increasing role, particulalry those blogs, like Jeff’s and Steve Mc’s, that provide full and open access to code and invite reproduction and verification (again, in stark contrast to many, though thankfully not all, alarmist blogs). Not all science takes place within the hallowed pages of journals, particularly when it has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the climate ‘consensus’ is supported by deliberate, knowing, intentional, behind-the-scenes attempts to control of the content of those journals.

Jeff, it seems you’re intent on working very hard to remove any doubts anyone could have about your honesty. You’ve made an imagined “trick” out of a totally unimportant example, while ignoring valid and strong criticism of your arbitrary treatment of sea ice. But OK, that’s a technical discussion, you’ve got the right to be wrong.

The second issue, however, leaves no doubt whatsoever about who’s wrong and why: you picked one datapoint and proceeded to draw conclusions about “scientifically discernible impact on sea ice” based on its reaching the longterm average, while totally ignoring an easily discernible, accelerating multidecadal trend.

I refuse to believe that anyone who aspires to discuss science might not know why this is wrong. Unfortunately, wiggle room is not present here. You can either admit error, or stay in denial. Judging by your “I’m not even sure I will address Tammie’s second post because it is only there to distract the crowd from his screw up” — you already made your choice.

Quiet Waterssaid

Layman Lurker says: “I think the confusion is understandable. We are trying to note the area which does not support multi year ice. This is not the same as trying to sum all the annual ice. Nor should it be.”

I think the confusion is inevitable given the terms used.

If it is not the same as trying to sum all the annual ice then the term should not be “global single year ice” as this is not what is being measured.

Moving on from this we can then look at the other hemisphere. In the previous post Jeff says “I did not mask the Antarctic data because Antarctic sea ice melts almost completely in the summer.” I am assuming that Jeff is therefore removing the Antarctic ice shelves from the metric as that hasn’t melted for several thousand summers, though, again this isn’t clear. Aside from that, has any effort been made to distinguish Antarctic ice that has frozen during the austral winter from ice that has calved from said ice sheets and on-land glaciers?

jasonpettittsaid

Melting ice is important in several different ways. There’s a direct contribution to sea level which we can gloss past today because that has little to do with sea ice extent. That’s related to mass and volume and is much more relevant to land ice.

Sea Ice Extent (surface area of shiny ice) matters because of how much solar radiation it reflects, and how much solar radiation is absorbed by the dark water that’s revealed when it melts. The reflectivity/absorption of ice/water affects something called the Solar Radiation Budget (SRB). The less sea ice, the higher the SRB.

But that only happens during the summer months. It matters not a jot how much ice there is in winter (when ice regrows) because there is no sun to reflect or absorb. Don’t forget – Day/Night length is extreme at the poles. The effect of that all that winter ice refreeze on the SRB is effectively 0.

Fudging sea ice extent data from the the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere together fails to differentiate between summer and winter. The summer melt in the Arctic during the polar day is important because it has an effect on SRB. It is not in any way ‘balanced out’ by winter ice growth in the south because, due to the polar night, the sea ice extent has no effect on the solar radiation budget.

Sea Ice Extent is seasonally important. Using statistics that hide seasonal changes by combining the two hemispheres is a fundamentally poor way to investigate a seasonal impact.

Carricksaid

This is the trouble Tamino gets for jumping into the middle of a multi-thread series of posts by Jeff, and just running off and criticizing one of them without bothering to learn its context.

And it what the mouth breathers on his blog get for trusting him implicitly. He’s way to volatile for anything he says to not be fully vetted before accepting it.

Anyway, the context here is the question (as Jeff points out for the 10^6 time) the degree to which the warming is causing ice loss and whether that can be separated from mechanical loss (which might have an origin either in global temperature change or from unforced natural variation, and you need a 30 year interval to robustly distinguish the two effects).

In the context of that question, I was pointing out to Jeff that although the Antarctic hasn’t been losing ice (it’s been gaining ice), it also hasn’t been warming down there, so if long-term ice loss/gain is driven by temperature rather than mechanical losses (which I think must be the case, mechanical losses shouldn’t have secular trends involved in them, unless there is a coupling between the “unforced” variations and climate), then this is a fully consistent picture.

As I understand the point of the 72°N cut-off, it’s to focus only on annual ice, and to me unshockingly, when you do so, you confirm that the ice loss is driven by temperature changes.

Don’t expect a follow up comment from Tamino admitting to error and misreading the content, intent and implications of Jeff’s posts. Admitting to his faults isn’t one of his stronger suits.

Now I return you to the regularly scheduled program where village idiots mindlessly garble Tamino’s already badly garbled posts.

Yes, Carrick, I don’t doubt that total denial might be a good damage control tactics on this blog — after all, you’re preaching to the converted here. And when this doesn’t work, then the mysterious “context” appears. OK, tell me then what “context” do I need for this graph:

to be able to comment it like this: “Sea ice is above average. Despite my belief in CO2 global warming’s effect, I really don’t believe it has had any scientifically discernible impact on sea ice. Nutin!!”?

Come on, enlighten the village idiot, explain to me how one season’s readings nullify a multidecadal trend. I know you can do it.

Carricksaid

Grzegorz, data are data. Unless Jeff fabricated the data for that graph, it tells its own story, it’s our responsibility to “listen” to the data and figure out what that story is.

It’s our responsibility to not ignore data that don’t fit into our own story, and the story of how it came to pass that global sea ice doesn’t reflect the temperature changes is an interesting one. In part this story is interesting because if the unexplained lack of warming in the Antarctica is responsible for the absence of a decline in sea ice in the Antarctica, it just sets the question off somewhere else… why isn’t the Antarctica warming like it is supposed to?

Come on, enlighten the village idiot

Sorry that’s outside of my training, as is dealing with people with Aspberger’s Syndrome. You’ll need to consult somebody else for both of those problems.

“Apparently sea ice doesn’t agree with the global warming agenda. I haven’t looked in months and would love to update the sea ice videos but I have to re-download the GB of data. Today I took at the Cryosphere site (after literally months) and found this plot”

I’m sorry, but as I said there’s no wiggle room here. You ignored a multidecadal trend that’s visible even by simply eyeballing the graph, and proceeded to say things about “scientifically discernible impact” based on one season going back to the average. That’s as discrediting as it gets. If you don’t see it, then you’ve really just removed any last doubt about your credibility.

The data show a very clear, accelerating, downward trend over the last 30 years. So please, explain what “context” may turn this into “[no] scientifically discernible impact on sea ice. Nutin!!”? Can you?

The problem is that you have a narrow definition of how sea ice area “matters”, and thus seem to criticize Jeff for using this data in a different way. Indeed, as you say, when it comes to the Earth’s energy budget (TOA is more important than surface with regards to future warming), the ice albedo of a region will have a greater impact during the months with the greatest insolation in that region. But presumably you are interested in this insolation-weighted sea ice metric (although, you’d need to take into account cloud cover as well) because of its implication for the surface/ice albedo feedback…in which case, it is not only the change in TOA radiation that results from changes in sea ice area (dR/dA), but also the expected change in ice area with respect to future (CO2-induced) global surface temperature changes (dA/dT). My understanding is that by splitting the regions, Jeff is attempting to separate the changes in sea icea area that result from global temperature change from those which merely result from local/natural weather changes in the Arctic. It seems to me that attempting to estimate this quantity (dA/dT) is indeed an useful undertaking, no?

It’s not that your code and data are wrong. It’s that you’re trying to use statistics to support an argument that’s illogical to begin with. Single year ice (the slush puppy thin stuff) is plentiful (and increasingly so over time) North of 72 degrees – so sea ice South of 72 is plainly a poor definition of single year ice and a poor metric for trying to understand how sea ice is changing over time.

Neither is it at all apparent that ice south of 72 degrees melts for anthropogenic reasons whereas ice North of 72 degrees melts (increasingly) due to natural variability. The 72 degree cut off may as well be arbitrary. That you’ve ingeniously (kudos) computed it doesn’t alter the fact that it neither tells us reliably which is single year ice, how ice is changing or whether the change is due to anthropogenic activity.

Jeff Condonsaid

“That you’ve ingeniously (kudos) computed it doesn’t alter the fact that it neither tells us reliably which is single year ice, how ice is changing or whether the change is due to anthropogenic activity.”

Almost right. It does tell us how it is changing but it doesn’t separate AGW from GW. It also tells us an approximate range for the temperature based effect.

John Billssaid

I have concerns of Jeff’s methodology as well. But there are things it is not. Picking one data point and stating as Jeff did is not incorrect, it may be naive, which in this case is defined as not having much explanatory capabilities. I will say Staniak that the last time you came on board, we pointed out your misreading and miscomprehension of what was written. You are doing it again. The one year point is worth exactly one year point, with the according methodology, as would 30 years give 30 points according to the same methodology. There is nothing to be wrong about in the statement of “[no] scientifically discernible impact on sea ice. Nutin!!” which may be another naive statement.

But just as you point out Jeff’s naive point, there is one that is not so naive. That if CO2 and the positive feedback are what was stated, then we are at the point that the natural variance has to be greater than what has been accpeted by the concensus. I do not know about sea ice, but using Chapter 10 of AR4, we are reaching the point that with the variance that was stated for the year 2030, means that the largest antropogenic trend that can be supported is 0.15C/decade, not the 0.2C/decade of AR4, or admit that the natural variance that went into the determination of attribution of the 20th is incorrect in magnitude.

I think also computing the annual limit of melt and checking against Jeff’s current for serial autocorrelation or better fit would be worthwhile. But he may have already done this. I wonder why he wasn’t asked, and the methodology discussed?

Carricksaid

The data show a very clear, accelerating, downward trend over the last 30 years

Beg your pardon, but you may want to clean your monitor.

For 20 of the 30 years, there was no change. There was a downward blip punctuated by the 2007 well-documented-as-weather-related-sea-ice-loss event in the Arctic Ocean, but global sea ice has recovered since then.

That’s not the same thing as “a very clear, accelerating, downward trend over the last 30 years.” In fact it is very much not the same as “a very clear, accelerating, downward trend over the last 30 years.”

The problem with idiots like you and tamino is anything that can’t be reconciled with the story that plays in your head for how global warming works just gets ignored or ridiculed.

Neither of you are capable of letting the data lead you where it takes you. I’m not convinced you can do anything besides ad hominem attacks. Tamino can do more than ad hominems, but that is still his speciality. You aren’t even very good at the ad hominems. You pretty much just suck all the way around.

Carricksaid

#32
If a real climate scientist produced such an idiocy, you would make another “-gate” out of it. That’s not “naive”, that’s making silly claims about “scientifically discernible” effects based on an error for which a high school kid would flunk their Statistics 101.

Carrick, you’re really funny when you complain about getting ad hominem, but the sad part is when you slip into a total denial of reality. Repeat what Tamino did. Download the data from CT, compute the regressions. If you don’t see the downward trend, look again. Rinse, repeat.

Carricksaid

I observe that Tamino does not show my questions asking for clarification.
Is that common practice?

To directly answer your question, Tamino is a coward for refusing to accept comments that are critical of his work, and anybody who makes comments on his blog criticizing other people knowing that any responses to those comments will get safely excised by Tamino is a coward for doing so.

You may not know the story, but Lucia got banned for pointing out an error in Tamino’s post. I quit posting there (under less odious circumstances) after I got fed up with tamino refusing to admit that the data were doing what the data were doing (pretty much what our pretzel-led up friend on this blog is doing, describing a few year bump in an otherwise stationary time series as “a very clear, accelerating, downward trend over the last 30 years).

Tamino and that crowd want to focus on the Arctic Ocean, which as Jeff points out, is especially vulnerable to weather related ice loss, and they want to ignore the Antarctic ice gain, because it’s inconvenient and they can’t explain it and it doesn’t fit into their child’s story-book version of how global warming is suppose to advance.

Carricksaid

Grzegorz Staniak, or you can just look at the data, and satisfy yourself that 2007 is an outlier and the data very clearly do not show “a very clear, accelerating, downward trend over the last 30 years.”

Tamino and I have had the discussion about the dangers in using OLS before when you have an outlier near the edge of the data set. Does he listen? Of course not.

Just as you will continue to not acknowledge that you are completely and utterly wrong when you claimed that the data show “a very clear, accelerating, downward trend over the last 30 years.”

Admit to your errors, and people will stop shoving them in your face. Stop making hilariously wrong errors and they’ll even stop pointing them out.

Carricksaid

If you look at global mean temperature versus global ice extent what you don’t see is a straightforward relationship between global temperature trend and global ice extent (I understand that this tends to be a more robust measure than area, due to limitations in the satellite systems, so I picked it on that basis):

The 1980s have a modest temperature increase and a modest loss in global sea ice extent
The 1990s show a net increase in ice, that was the most rapidly warming decade in the last 30 years.
The 2000s had a modest temperature change, yet see the largest decline (driven mostly by weather related ice loss in 2007).

Here are the numbers, I’m using NCDC temperature as I think it is most reliable, using the other series doesn’t change the answers much (neither does using extent instead of area). And I’m using “median fit” (minimum of absolute value of residuals) because it’s a more robust measure:

Almost looks like they correlate (instead of anti-correlating which they should).

[The answer to this conundrum is pretty straight forward: You need to correlate southern ice loss, with mean temperature in that region, and northern ice loss with in that region too.]

Tamino, in my experience, likes to give just enough information to bolster whatever argument he wants to make, then stops there. That’s not a very honest approach, even if Peter Gleick would approve (and he would too).

Carricksaid

…. decelerating with respect to a downward trend, which is the sense in which Grzegorz pompously claimed that there is “a very clear, accelerating downward trend over the last 30 years.”

Sorry some things simply aren’t true because you want them to be. Global ice doesn’t act as a proxy for global temperature, tamino is a very smart guy who is really good at statistics, but not in line for a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, or at least he shouldn’t be, but somebody who obviously suffers from emotional problems.

Or he wouldn’t get so bent when somebody pointed out mistakes that he made, or pointed to data that don’t “help the cause.”

Peace and out. Back to work. Thanks for something in which Peter Gleick’s name showed up only twice, this being the second. ;-)

hey Carrick…it’s easieer just to ignore failed comedians such as Grzegorz – he must be getting bored because a back-up routine hasn’t failed as yet today. If he were not here baiting folks, he would would be photocpying his ass.

Greg Fsaid

… everybody knows that existing glaciers — like those in the Swiss passes and Alaska — are melting? How could new ice hulks creep in upon us while weather experts are announcing that even the North Polar ice caps are thinning? And what about the fact that weather records show the weather has been growing warmer over the years – so warm in fact that certain glaciers are melting fast enough to raise the level of the world’s oceans?

It is a fascinating article made even more so as it was published March 29, 1958.

Hm, is this the modus operandi here? “Just look at the data” and write whatever you want to see in them? Thank, but no thanks. I just saw Jeff Condon do it in the “Opps. We hit the average” article and it’s definitely not something that I would want to do.

Carrick, in view of your defense of the idiotic blunder about no “scientifically discernible impact” based on one year’s readings, your advice about “admitting to errors” is a Mount Everest of hipocrysy. The data is out there (CT). Statistical analysis software is freely available. Show me how you don’t get the trend after applying simple regressions to the data, or stop blatantly distort the facts.

Greg Fsaid

Carricksaid

Grzegorz Staniak, sorry but your blather is not a defense of your erroneous claim that there is “a very clear, accelerating downward trend over the last 30 years.” You made the claim, the claim is false, you should admit error and failure on your part to understand what the data say, and move along.

And the facts are you’re wrong, Tamino is partly right but but makes an error by apply the wrong mode, a linear trend, to something that isn’t a simple trend, and so he makes the wrong conclusion. What he’s done is equivalent to fitting a sine wave to a straight line or worse.

As I noted above, global ice extent is not a proxy for global mean temperature, to the extent that it is influenced by temperature change rather than mechanical loss (“Eckmann transport”), it is driven by regional scale temperatures not global ones.

You should stop assuming you know enough to argue as an equal on this one. Sorry, but you don’t.

Carricksaid

Let me clarify this: “What he’s done is equivalent to fitting a sine wave to a straight line or worse”

What I meant to say was he was the equivalent of fitting a sine wave (e.g.) the data to a straight line (his model).

Given that there is an oscillation in the rate of ice loss (or even gain) which has a period that is roughly the same length as the temporal window he uses, the results of the operation he has performed is completely meaningless.

It’s ok to fit a sine wave, what isn’t ok is the interpretation. In Grants critique, he uses the example of a landlocked piece of ocean known to refreeze every year and plots ‘refreeze’ in this region showing an uptrend.

Then he blows the whole thing by asking what I will say in the future when sea ice doesn’t reach average. An assumed prediction based on a polynomial fit is rarely a safe bet.

There is nothing wrong with plotting the region. Where it goes wrong is in the assumption.

think of it like this – what if we could ONLY detect single year ice by satellite yet knew the Multi-year existed by observation. Would it be ok then to plot the single year ice to interpret the extent of the multi-year ice?

Tamino assumed an interpretation of the data by myself which existed in only his head. Now he looks bad for it.

Carricksaid

let me rephrase that and say it’s not useful to fit sine wave with a linear function (unless you are using a very short interval compared to the period of oscillation). What Grant has done is neither useful in this example, nor is his interpretation of his useless operation correct.

Jerkysaid

#56, They cultivate guys like Grzegorz and Jerkey who don’t even think for a moment that numbers have meaning. It is completely impossible for anyone except for licensed climatologists to have opinions on data. Of course they don’t even realize there is no such thing.

You can tell that they couldn’t even explain the basics of AGW without extreme effort yet will come by to tell us how we should think. It’s a sheep farm that hasn’t been cleaned in a decade.

Oh, “the claim is false”. By your decree. No doubt because you’ve “just looked at the data”. Well, keep looking then. In the meantime I’ll be looking again at the results people get when they actually analyse the data, not “just look” at them, in your and Jeff’s fashion.

Your “opinion on the data” was an idiotic blunder, no matter how much you deny this. I couldn’t believe anybody could actually say something so silly when I ran across that gem at Tamino’s, but then I went to your blog and lo and behold, there it was. If someone were to claim that “last summer was very hot, so of course we have a global warming” you’d personally crucify them — and rightly so. But then when it’s your blunder, you apply a different set of standards.

CoRevsaid

#59 said: “In the meantime I’ll be looking again at the results people get when they actually analyse the data, not “just look” at them, in your and Jeff’s fashion.”

And that’s the issue. You can not replicate the methods Jeff and Carrick used to do the analysis, even though Jeff provided code. You must rely on other, different methods and reports to support your own (Oops, Tammy’s) views of the ice data.

Jeff is doing something quite different from the normal approach. Just different, neither good nor bad. And that’s why you guys have been so laughably funny to watch your (all of you folks) over reactions.

Carricksaid

Oh, “the claim is false”. By your decree. No doubt because you’ve “just looked at the data”. Well, keep looking then. In the meantime I’ll be looking again at the results people get when they actually analyse the data, not “just look” at them, in your and Jeff’s fashion.

Actually, I analyzed the data, I told you how I analyzed it, why the approach I used was superior to Tamino’s, I presented the results of the analysis which showed the error in Tamino’s interpretation of his data, … and so forth.

And that is just looking at data.

LOLZ.

You are so clueless right now, you couldn’t find your ass with two hands and a Garmin GPS.

I was stating facts. It’s a fact that you wrote an article in which you claimed there was no “scientifically discernible impact” of temperature rises on the sea ice, based on one year’s data, just because those yearly data reached the long-term average. Now, my opinion is that this constitues a gross methodological blunder. Some of your followers are gentle enough to just call this a “naive” statement, but I think you gave up this line of defense once you decided to dress up the naive statement in words like “scientifically”. Well, scientifically, it’s rubbish.

Carricksaid

Actually, Grzegorz all you’ve demonstrated is your poor reading comprehension skills plus your complete ignorance of data analysis methodologies. Had you been able to coherently frame a genuine criticism of Jeff, and been right, I would have agreed with it. He and I will butt heads sometimes.

However, as I said, unfortunately you’re way out of your league. Most people in this position quickly realize this quickly and egress, unfortunately for you, you’re one of those types that doesn’t even know that they don’t know. You’re certainly fooling nobody here that you have the slightest clue that you’re talking about.

“Hm, is this the modus operandi here? “Just look at the data” and write whatever you want to see in them? Thank, but no thanks. I just saw Jeff Condon do it in the “Opps. We hit the average” article and it’s definitely not something that I would want to do.”

I see Gregor, you are well named. No I am not referring to your self proclaimed Village Idiot status even though you seem to be intent on proving it. Nope, I am referring to your insistance that only you warmers apparently know how to interpret the data and it must be the data you select and in the manner you have chosen or it isn’t correct. You know, kinda like the Soviet Handlers that used make sure everyone stayed politically in line!!! Tell me, where did you get your HANDLER training??

Nope, I am not going to comment on the fact that you seem to think that trends are an invariant absolute that can never change in spite of the physics and the fact the physical world is continually changing!!

CoRevsaid

Grzegorz, since you are new here, and clearly don’t visit many skeptical blogs, you obviously are not aware of how most articles work here and elsewhere. If there are legitimate questions, they are usually answered after adequate rethinking of the original material. When those questions are accompanied with an attitude they are still usually answered and most often without attitude. When the attitude is continued accompanied with ignorance, then they get appropriate responses.

Quiet Waterssaid

Jeff says :”I’m sorry if the terminology was confusing. I tried to explain everything in detail in the posts. Ice shelves are not part of sea ice data. Watch the video below to see what is included.”

I’m sure you are, after all, we wouldn’t want people to be making claims about global single-year ice when the data is a subset of the global total would we?

I’m glad that my assumption that ice shelves are not included in the SH data, but your videos, though pretty, do not answer the question about how you disaggregated single-year ice from ice that has calved from the ice sheets and glaciers.

John f pittmansaid

GS, you need to understand that I think all the ice measurements as a proxy for temperature have bias, and in at least one sense, naive. The reason is physical; the triple point of water is at 0 C. This means a physical discontinuum wrt temperature or more properly energy or heat changes. We have not included freezing point depression present in salt water, nor sublimation due to changes in wind velocity, humidity, and altitude. In the case of thickness or glaciers it is a rate problem of various unmeasured properties such as snowfall, humidity, sublimation, and temperature at surface, and albedo. Any study has elements of assumptions that cannot be demonstrated one way or the other except at extremes.

That said, I think Jeff’s methodology tends to underestimate, just as I think the methods used by the climate scientists tend to overestimate. However, if you read good work, there willbe so many caveats, that one should realize that the information is little better than what we can observe: In general we have been warming. More specific claims need to be understood by the methodology, and the thoroughness of the work.

As a blog article, Jeff’s is fine. On the other hand, I do not know that I can say the same for Tamino since he isn’t addrssing the methodolgy that Jeff is using.

Jeff Condonsaid

“I’m glad that my assumption that ice shelves are not included in the SH data, but your videos, though pretty, do not answer the question about how you disaggregated single-year ice from ice that has calved from the ice sheets and glaciers.”

Quiet Waters,

Each pixel is 625 km^2 so that Manhattan size 59 km^2 chunk that is so big it makes “global warming doom news” is 1/11th of one pixel. Less than a single pixel. Hmm..

Jeff Condonsaid

“That said, I think Jeff’s methodology tends to underestimate, just as I think the methods used by the climate scientists tend to overestimate.”

I think you may be misunderstanding the meaning of the post. I wasn’t trying to estimate total global single year ice, I was trying to gain a different correlation to temperature to understand if mechanical processes had affected the multi-year ice and address Carricks original critique. Had I tried to estimate ‘total single year ice’ it would have fallen accurately under Tamino’s first fake critique because as the multi-year ice vanishes, open sea area for new ice formation exists. My method also allowed us to estimate how the multi-year ice is changing in the real world due to warming. It actually matched some of the literature on the matter well.

Had I masked the pole multi-year ice off and added it in, we certainly would see an uptrend or no-trend in the plot, but it wouldn’t have any meaning that could allow us to move forward.

People seem to genuinely miss the point of the math. Nothing about it was arbitrary but it is an estimate. Choosing a method which included the area north of 72, simply wouldn’t allow this study to exist. Tamino misunderstood and went nuts. After he understood, he changed direction and wrote two more posts attacking older material here.

The irony is that these people don’t realize that the other methods they are banging on about, wouldn’t give more loss, they would give more gain in single year ice area. What we have here is the maximum negative trend for single year ice on a percentage basis possible, I then attributed it to warming, and been vehemently attacked by the believers for it because I called attention to the fact that global single year ice still fell just short of an arbitrary significance threshold using a very basic CI method.

I bolded it because the ironic humor of that shouldn’t be lost on the reader.

So anyone who thinks it is an underestimate of single year sea ice loss please show me how to make the trend stronger so the believers can be happy!!

Thanks for your reply Jeff. I ran it in my head and realized that other methods would most probably decrease the trend that certain persons would want to increase, and that it fell short of the signifigance threshold you set already. They did provide a humorous moment . But still, I do wonder if the methodology has a bias in it that would effect the signifigance.

It is that different “”correlation to temperature”” part that I have some methodological worries; but then I am stilling reading and thinking about the posts. I don’t mind discussing what I think, so that I can learn, even if I am wrong, or have misinformed myself. Otherwise, learning is a bit slow and unrelaible.

Jeff Condonsaid

The correlation to temperature could simply be because of more area coverage. I didn’t take it that far with this post because I was more interested in replying to Tamino’s game playing. I really do find it amusing that I maximized the effect for the northern hemisphere and got slammed for it.

If you look back at the post with the NH north of 72 and south of 72 plots, another interesting clue which we haven’t discussed is that the CI is much greater north of that line despite having nearly identical amounts of area. This may indicate the fact that single year ice spends some time near zero, but it also may indicate additional processes causing variance. It might be worth exploring also.

#28 – And how do you suppose mashing up Northern and Southern Hemisphere data into a false ‘global picture’ is going to help there? That’s my beef. It’s not that Jeff is looking at data – he’s very welcome to do that (though leaping in at the middle of a random hypothesis without first doing the legwork to show that the premises it’s built upon are sound is a sure way to waste your time), My beef is that he’s mashing the two hemispheres together in a way that hides the salient information and then asserts that something we can see very plainly by looking at the hemispheres separately, isn’t significant. Hiding information by losing it in bad statistics is bad statistics. Why would you want to look at sea ice extent as a global, annual homogeneous gloup of data, when the physics of changing sea ice extent counts on a regional and seasonal basis?

Knowing that ice is declining quickly in the north and gaining slowly in the south is useful. That’s what is happening in the real world and it’s useful to understand why. That you can mush them together and go ‘tada!’ I have vanished the statistics is smoke and mirrors.

That discounting ice North of 72 degrees also introduces a bias hardly matters.

“TOA is more important than surface with regards to future warming” ~ Troyca

Satellites are awesome, it’s fantastic that we have them measuring energy coming in and going out again. But measurements of outgoing energy taken from the Top of the Atmosphere won’t be a good gauge of the contribution from sea ice or any of the actual physics, causes and impacts. It’s a useful measure in its own right. But a poor, indirect, measure of sea ice.

TOA give us a broad, overall picture of the global energy budget. Teasing out and understanding the details, impacts and physical processes, like with sea ice extent, still requires looking at the details directly.

“Jeff is attempting to separate the changes in sea icea area that result from global temperature change from those which merely result from local/natural weather changes in the Arctic. It seems to me that attempting to estimate this quantity (dA/dT) is indeed an useful undertaking, no?” ~ Troyca

Being able to separate the natural variability and the anthropogenic forcing would be genuinely useful, there’s no question about that. Expecting it to be resolved by ignoring ice north of 72 degrees is wishful thinking. Calculating statistical significance from data as an exercise in and of itself is meaningless. It has to be statistical significance of something (your hypothesis) relative to something else (your null hypothesis). Jeff first needs a hypothesis and a null hypothesis and importantly to make sure those are themselves logical and robust. We need to know what we might and might not learn by masking ice north of 72 degrees before getting excited by the results.

Otherwise the obvious reply to a claim that change in sea ice extent of Southern Hemisphere ice and Northern Hemisphere ice South of 72 degrees isn’t statistically significant is ‘so what.’ You’re guaranteed an emotional response to the phrase ‘not statistically significant’, lots of people will run around the Internet thinking changes in ice extent is somehow ‘not statistically significant’ but the skeptic has to ask ‘yeah, but what isn’t it statistically significant of?’

Jeff Condonsaid

“in at the middle of a random hypothesis without first doing the legwork to show that the premises it’s built upon are sound”

Hmm. Are you certain of that? Or is it possible that you as a non-technical reader haven’t followed the argument and jumped into the middle without understanding the point?

“That discounting ice North of 72 degrees also introduces a bias hardly matters.” See doc, introducing the ice you suggest would create the bias, not introducing PREVENTS the bias. That is why Tamino moved on so quickly. He acted as though I had INTRODUCED the ice you are banging on about. Read his first post agian. He was critiquing me for TAKING your suggestion, then he realized I DIDN’T take your suggestion and moved on.

I showed the maximum percentage single year ice loss, attributed it to warming, Tamino misunderstood, and you guys are banging around like zoo monkeys demanding that I do the science the incorrect way that Tamino originally incorrectly critiqued me for.

What is more is that when you write this: “Calculating statistical significance from data as an exercise in and of itself is meaningless. It has to be statistical significance of something (your hypothesis) relative to something else (your null hypothesis). Jeff first needs a hypothesis and a null hypothesis and importantly to make sure those are themselves logical and robust.”

About the significance of a ‘trend’, you show a complete lack of chops to even try and critique this work.

“Otherwise the obvious reply to a claim that change in sea ice extent of Southern Hemisphere ice and Northern Hemisphere ice South of 72 degrees isn’t statistically significant is ‘so what.’”

It means that the trend fell just short of 95% significance on a very weak and unexplored AR1 test. Most methods will expand the CI from there. Some will tighten it – I don’t know which. It means that differentiating the trend from zero (your null) isn’t very easy. The northern hemisphere loss was very much significant though.

As a bit of advice, you should take Tamino’s lead and stop thrashing about on this one. He saw the light and didn’t bother to report it to you – climate science is NEVER wrong.

totosaid

See doc, introducing the ice you suggest would create the bias, not introducing PREVENTS the bias.

Sure. If I want to find out what affects sea ice, the first thing I’d do is put an arbitrary lower hard bound on the total amount of sea ice, which just happens to eliminate a chunk of the trend (because the maximums have gone down slower than the minimums). Makes perfect sense.

I showed the maximum percentage single year ice loss

I guess you have your own definition of “maximum”, considering that there is some single-year ice north of 72degC. Which, again, your arbitrary bound allows you to totally ignore.

Kenneth Fritschsaid

I think what we are seeing here are reactions from advocates and not scientists and thus the emotional content of some of the posts.

I know from past history that Jeff has been attempting to understand the climate variables that might affect Arctic sea ice extent including, I think, prevailing winds and, of course, temperature. I think we all have seen the past 30 year series of ice extent and ice area for the Arctic – on which Carrick has made some interesting comparisons between Arctic temperatures. I have not followed closely what Jeff is stating about the ice above 72 North but I have had the impression that he has been throwing out his views of what his videos where showing and at the same time attempting to use an area of the Arctic to give an estimate of the effects of temperature on annual ice melting. He was not presenting a hypothesis that was ready for prime time or publishing but rather for initiating discussion. Unfortunately it appears that the learning process gets shut down because some advocates think he was attempting to deflect attention from the 30 year ice extent record.

In my view of reasonable skeptics notions of what is causing the ice extent changes is that it is related to temperature but that other effects are probably operating and/or that the effects of temperature change on ice extent are not sufficiently understood to explain some of the current changes during the satellite era and estimated historical changes pre-satellite. Reasonable skeptics are also aware of and interested in the possible feedback effects of albedo due to open water in the Arctic summer.

There have been a lack of links to what published papers have to say on the related matters to the topic under discussion here. I would think a discussion of those papers could bring back a learning approach to the these threads and we could get off the Jeff Condon/Foster Grant dust-up.

Carricksaid

toto: I guess you have your own definition of “maximum”, considering that there is some single-year ice north of 72degC. Which, again, your arbitrary bound allows you to totally ignore.

LOL.

toto, do you really think Jeff just invented the concept threshold cut offs? Like they aren’t a standard analysis tool or something or that he didn’t have a basis for choosing the cut-off that he did. (He did have a basis, it’s contained in previous posts.

Like is getting sad, people with a half-assed understanding of statistics aren’t even entertaining to me anymore.

Carricksaid

And how do you suppose mashing up Northern and Southern Hemisphere data into a false ‘global picture’ is going to help there

Why is summing north plus south ice suddenly a “false global picture”? It’s what the data are.

You wanting the data to say something besides what they are saying doesn’t make the picture the data are painting false. It just means your understanding is not complete.

That discounting ice North of 72 degrees also introduces a bias hardly matters.

No, it eliminates a bias introduced by mixing multiyear ice with single year ice.

Being able to separate the natural variability and the anthropogenic forcing would be genuinely useful, there’s no question about that. Expecting it to be resolved by ignoring ice north of 72 degrees is wishful thinking

Nobody is thinking wistfully here. The 72°N cut was done purposefully and as I view it as an exploratory study. We’re pondering on this blog what it means (at least I still am), but choice of the latitude was not arbitrarily chosen.

In essence, your criticism is all wet.

Jason you are assuming that Tamino fairly described what Jeff has been working on, that premise is false. Tamino rarely fairly describes the work that anybody does that he criticizes This is part of a multi-year ongoing research project on the part of Jeff, and you’re stepping in after step 28 (pulling the actual number from a hat, I haven’t counted), assuming you understand the previous 27 without having read them.

You can do that when you prevent people who you are criticizing from commenting on your posts. It is certainly risky business to put too much weight on Tamino’s comments given how unwilling he is to come out from behind his protective wall that defends him from critique, rather than trying to come to a judgement on your own.

My opinion is, were I to run a blog and to run an article which was critical of another person’s work, that it would be appropriate to not only allow them a chance to respond via comments, but allow them to post an approved by me response on my blog. The only subject material not allowed would be OT rants and ad hominem attacks.

Of course, if Tamino were to apply those last crieria to his own posts, most of them would be half the length already.

steve fitzpatricksaid

I don’t think Tamino has the intellectual horsepower (or the intellectual honesty) to open his posts to comments by those who he criticizes. His moderation choices are easy to understand when viewed in that light. His is first and foremost a political blog; whatever science he writes about is nothing more than window dressing. Much of it is rubbish, and he knows it.

I don’t object, and have said so, the idea of masking ice above 72 degrees. I just have no reason to think that it’s all that meaningful. The real problem is doing a N.H. / S.H. seasonal / annual mash up at all.

I don’t think Tamino was suggesting you’re introducing a bias. As far as I know that’s me, not he.

You’ve argued that you don’t need to discount multi year ice in the S.H. because there’s hardly any there – it all melts. But real world data tells us that there was actually just shy of 4 million sq km of sea ice extent at the peak of the 2012 summer melt in the S.H. compared with 4.5 million sq km in the N.H. in 2011. And that’s a gap that’s closing over time. The idea that there’s much less multi year ice in the Antarctic looks to be increasingly historical as the Arctic rapidly loses muti year ice and the Antarctic slowly gains it. That’s what makes me suspect a bias when you discount the North but not the South. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about that.

But as I said. It hardly matters because even I, in my non technical way, can see that homogenising seasonal into annual and N.H. and S.H. data is just a fundamentally poor metric for looking at regional differences or albedo and feedbacks and how they might respond to warming. The N.H. and S.H. have different, regionally specific, issues. Lumping them together blurs those issues rather than reveals them.

Jeff Condonsaid

Well that is an opinion but that is all it is. UIUC cryosphere also lumps them together. To make sure that I would not be accused of something wrong, like fraudulently misrepresenting data, I also showed them individually. Your point on the Antarctic multi-year ice is a good one though. In the Antarctic, I don’t think it would make much difference. I will try and mask a few more areas though and see what happens.

earthshinesaid

Interesting article and comments. I apologize if this information is listed elsewhere and I’ve overlooked it. I’m curious to know your backgrounds in statistics/engineering/mathematics, etc. I stumbled through statistics in college and won’t even pretend that I remember any of it. A man has got to know his limitations and I certainly know mine. But I would like to improve my built-in automatic crap detector regarding the statistical results being presented regarding AGW. I’ve been the recipient of the moderator’s hook at Tamino’s Open Mind (which is seemingly an oxymoron given his penchant of disallowing critical remarks, but I digress..) and I would like to prove to myself that his methods are intended to obfuscate instead of enlighten.

Jeff Condonsaid

totosaid

If I had done what you ask, the trend would be a lower percentage (less significant)

If you had included the whole ice, the additive constant wouldn’t do anything to the significance of the trend (I hope I misunderstood you). OTOH, it would remove the very real artifact created by introducing a hard lower bound, when minima decrease faster than maxima, and the lower bound happens to fall between the two.

Which is at least one reason why the normal-ice trend is significant, whereas the JeffIce ™ trend isn’t. ;)

Carrick: I’ll humbly defer to your mad stats skillz, considering my own utter inability to deduce “oscillations” and “recovery” from one peak and one trough of ten-year trends :p

Jeff Condonsaid

Reader background above is a good place to start, although I would encourage you to ignore peoples credentials and simply look at the math. Credentials only get you started in life. I am an engineer with a fantastic resume and some publications – who cares.

Lots of people here are more educated than I, which you will see from the background thread. There are a few sleepers in this thread alone though, none of whom have ever minded telling me I’m wrong. It keeps me straight but also makes Tamino’s crowd look like a pile of rocks.

Veritassaid

Thanks for directing me to the background page (and for mitigating my dyslexia on the first post). Credentials aren’t the “be all, end all” but do account for something. I’m biased and tend to believe more the arguments of those with degrees in the hard sciences and not just membership in the AAVSO.

Jeff Condonsaid

Kenneth Fritschsaid

In the first paper that I found in my search that talks about Arctic ice extent and potential effects, I came across the article linked and excerpted below.

The paper is almost a contradiction in terms as it discusses the natural causes for variation in ice extent over longer time periods and then presents a correlation between CO2 levels and ice extent over the period 1961-2007 that the paper claims empirically explains 90 % of the ice extent variation by CO2 levels. No lags and evidently no persistent natural effects countering this relationship. The paper appears to slide over the issues of auto correlation and also does not provide a physical scheme for explaining this excellent relationship. The paper points to what it sees as a failure of the climate models to predict the ice extent loses and almost seems to be proposing that scenario predicted CO2 levels be used for predicting ice extent in the 21st century. Note that the CO2 to temperature relationship over the 1961-2007 period using the authors same statistical methodology has CO2 explaining only approximately 50% of the temperature rise.

There are some points raised in the paper that I judge relate rather directly to what we are discussing in this thread.

“Arctic sea ice is a keystone indicator of greenhouse-gas induced global climate change, which is
expected to be amplified in the Arctic. Here we directly compare observed variations in arctic sea-ice extent and CO2 since the beginning of the 20th century, identifying a strengthening linkage, such that in recent decades the rate of sea-ice decrease mirrors the increase in CO2, with r ~ –0.95 over the last four decades, thereby indicating that 90% (r2 ~ 0.90) of the decreasing sea-ice extent is empirically
“accounted for” by the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere…

..It is well known that natural variability on seasonal, interannual and decadal timescales plays a significant role
in changes in the ice cover. For example, during the early 20th-century warming event, Russian observations of
annual sea-ice extent covering 77% of the Arctic region showed a reduction of 0.6×106 km2 from 1915–35, concurrent with an increase of 2.3ºC in surface air temperature (SAT) in the latitude band 70–90ºN during the same period (Fig. 5 in Johannessen et al., 2004). This early warming event was most likely caused by the natural multidecadal fluctuations arising from the Atlantic Ocean (Zhang et al., 2007), including stronger westerlies and advection of warmer water into the Barents Sea, thereby reducing the ice extent and causing increased heat flux into the atmosphere as a positive feedback process (Bengtsson et al., 2004)…

…A more recent but opposite event was the large increase of 1.4×106 km2 in sea-ice extent occurring during
the summer of 1996, probably caused by an extreme temporary reversal of the North Atlantic Oscillation
(NAO) in the winter of 1995/96, which lowered the SAT, thereby freezing more sea ice (Fig. 3 in Johannessen et al., 2004).

In the most recent years (2000–07) record lows in the September sea-ice extent minima have been observed
(e.g., Serreze et al., 2003; Johannessen et al., 2004; Rigor et al., 2004; Stroeve et al., 2005, 2006 and 2008;
Maslanik et al., 2007; Meier et al., 2007; Comiso et al., 2008). The record thus far was observed in mid September 2007, with an abnormal decrease in the western and central sector of the Arctic Ocean resulting in a minimum sea-ice extent of 4.1×106 km2, or 24% lower than the previous
record low of 5.4×106 km2 reached in September 2005 and about 37% lower than the September 1979–
2007 satellite climatological average (Comiso et al., 2008). Comiso et al. (2008) also concluded that “satellite
surface temperature data indicate that the growth of sea ice was likely hindered and the retreat likely enhanced by anomalously high temperature in previous months, especially in February and April 2007. Southerly winds, which advect warm air from lower latitudes, were prevalent during the summer, and this is also likely to have en hanced the ice retreat, through northward transport of the sea ice, lessened ice growth and increased melt”, while Stroeve et al. (2008) also pointed to other factors such as the thinning ice pack and unusually clear skies during the summer months of 2007.

A reasonable interpretation of the record low sea-ice extent in September 2007 is that it is probably another
example of a natural variability, however caused by a mechanism other than the Atlantic-driven warming event
between 1915–35 and the NAO event in 1996􀃼both described above. The record low in September 2007 can
possibly be explained by the Overland and Wang (2005) mechanism that “internal processes in the western Arctic may have a larger role in shaping the present persistence of the Arctic change than has been previously recognized during recent years when the Arctic Oscillation (AO) has been near-neutral.” One should also note that after the minimum ice extent in September 2007, the ice extent rebounded rapidly to a winter maximum in March 2008 that was actually higher than in the previous four years1. Therefore we can reasonably expect similar, strong natural variability events in the future, causing both decreases and increases of the arctic sea-ice cover on seasonal to decadal time scales, superposed on the general trend of a decreasing ice cover projected by IPCC models (IPCC, 2007).”

Because CO2 and SAT are not independent variables the correlation between them for the 1961–2007 period is
r = 0.76􀃼both of them cannot meaningfully be used simultaneously as predictors in a multiple-regression analysis for the decreasing ice extent (predictand). Therefore the higher correlation, r = –0.95, between ice extent and CO2, which also integrates other processes in addition to the SAT, is used here for further study.”

Carricksaid

Carrick: I’ll humbly defer to your mad stats skillz, considering my own utter inability to deduce “oscillations” and “recovery” from one peak and one trough of ten-year trends :p

I’m afraid that’s the strawman that broke the camel’s back.

Fitting a sine to a linear trend was an example I gave of a misapplication of the use of linear trend (where most of the variance isn’t being explained by the linear trend). I never claimed the variability in global sea ice extent had anything to do with anything in particular, sine wave or otherwise.

I guess inventing a strawman makes it easier for you not to have to deal with reality, well whatever cranks your tractor.

The point here is the same in so far as most of the variance is a long-term variation in global ice extent that doesn’t have an easy explanation in terms of being forced by global mean temperature. In fact, as the curve shows the period with peak global trend also corresponds (paradoxically it seems) with period of maximum ice growth.

I don’t have an explanation for why it is like it is, merely pointing out that it is that way, and trying to reduce what is a non-simple picture to a linear regression is a mistake.

Sorry guys but it is too much fun. The enlightened over at Tamino’s went on for literally dozens of comments about a critique of a two year old autocorrelation coefficient which was biased due to filtering. There are only two comments which even mention the word and neither is technical. Like our company, I love the competition. These are our fearless leaders to the global future.

Sorry Steve. The boys/girls are so busy pounding on me for having a high biased autocorrelation coefficient – two and a half years ago – that nobody had the wits to mention autocorrelation. I even admitted the problem and they still didn’t grock it.

It’s hilarious.

I did the same post again 30 days ago, which Grant didn’t realize, and had the ~ same AR1 based CI he came up with. He wrote all kinds of crap about my intent etc. and I have a recent post which matches his! The CI is basic AR1 with no analysis whatsoever and Tamino was playing like it was a big deal.

The whole thing is so old that it was Pre-climategate 1.0 by a week.

It’s even better than I’m describing, but were I meaner, comet Tamino would be the next post.

page488said

steve fitzpatricksaid

Thanks for the clarification. If I were you, I would throw down the gauntlet with Tamino. Point our (loudly) anywhere you can, like WUWT, the Blackboard, Climate Audit and elsewhere, that the cowardly little worm will criticize and attack you but will never allow a response in his tightly controlled echo chamber filled with sycophants and idiots. He is so intellectually dishonest (and so devoid of ca-hones) that he is an embarrassment to thinking people everywhere. Nobody (and I mean nobody) should pay any attention to him or anything he says. Call him out.

“Tamino’s never wrong on anything, and if he is, you’re banned for life. Just remember that”

He’s banned me in the past for asking if Ian Jollieffe was a reviewer of MM, followed by a sea ice post which I had an error in – and admitted. He would critique tAV and leave the thread monkeys to bash wildly so I couldn’t reply. I wrote him a very short comment full of color explaining his eunuch status – because he has to read them all to moderate them. A few months later I re-iterated a similar thought once more. Now has allowed every single comment through with only inline editing. It’s like we’re old frenemies. I like his blog 1% more for it.

Banned for life only means banned until he decides it doesn’t fit his needs anymore.

steve fitzpatricksaid

Kenneth Fritschsaid

The below linked and excerpted paper from the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences shows a declining western Arctic sea ice extent over the past 9000 years but with a recovery period in the past 1000 years. The paper hits on the notion that sea ice extent has been less in the past than in the present time and without evidence of an albedo feedback effect reaching a tipping point.

I have reservations about all reconstructions, temperature or otherwise, and thus without a lot of digging and analysis I could not say how valid I would judge the reconstruction of ice extent is in this paper. Also what applied in the past does not necessarily apply to the modern era with AGW, but the paper should add to what we might conjecture about arctic sea ice extent.

“Abstract: Cores from site HLY0501-05 on the Alaskan margin in the eastern Chukchi Sea were analyzed for their geochemical (organic carbon, d13Corg, Corg/N, and CaCO3) and palynological (dinocyst, pollen, and spores) content to document oceanographic changes during the Holocene. The chronology of the cores was established from 210Pb dating of near- surface sediments and 14C dating of bivalve shells. The sediments span the last 9000 years, possibly more, but with a gap between the base of the trigger core and top of the piston core. Sedimentation rates are very high (*156 cm/ka), allowing analyses with a decadal to centennial resolution. The data suggest a shift from a dominantly terrigenous to marine input from the early to late Holocene. Dinocyst assemblages are characterized by relatively high concentrations (600–7200 cysts/cm3) and high species diversity, allowing the use of the modern analogue technique for the reconstruction of sea-ice cover, summer temperature, and salinity. Results indicate a decrease in sea-ice cover and a corresponding, albeit much smaller, increase in summer sea-surface temperature over the past 9000 years. Superimposed on these long-term trends are millennial-scale fluctuations characterized by periods of low sea-ice and high sea-surface temperature and salinity that appear quasi-cyclic with a frequency of about one every 2500–3000 years. The results of this study clearly show that sea-ice cover in the western Arctic Ocean has varied throughout the Holocene. More importantly, there have been times when sea-ice cover was less extensive than at the end of the 20th century…

…Conclusion

The Holocene record from site HLY0501-05 illustrates the sensitivity of hydrographical conditions in the western Arctic Ocean. The data show a long-term warming that is opposite to what is reconstructed for the eastern Arctic and point to a bipolar behavior of the Arctic Ocean at the timescale of the Holocene. The millennial-scale variability in the eastern Chukchi Sea is characterized by quasi-cyclic periods
of high SSS, high SST, and reduced sea-ice cover, which most probably reflects variations in the stratification of the upper water column. Such changes maybe related to tidal forcing and (or) large-scale mechanisms, such as AO/NAOlike oscillations. It is important to note that the amplitude of these millennial-scale changes in sea-surface conditions far exceed those observed at the end of the 20th century.”

KenMsaid

Now keep in mind that RomanM is a devote Steve McIntyre supporter– you know, the clan who believe that they know better than the scientists and statisticians. RomanM’s glib dismissal of the very valid critique made by Jason (“Sea Ice Extent is seasonally important. Using statistics that hide seasonal changes by combining the two hemispheres is a fundamentally poor way to investigate a seasonal impact”) points a fundemental misunderstanding of the physics at work here by him and Condon and Condon’s supporters. RomanM is also fabricaing a stupid strawman argument, and being an uncritical bunch, noone over there has called him on it.

Who said seasonal impact was the focus of the investigation?
The $64K question is whether anyone on the “Open Mind” site will call Mr./Ms. Leaf on *his* strawman argument.

Kenneth Fritschsaid

Jeff, I would suppose that you must feel some sense of power in that you can present some splendid, informative, non controversial and 3D videos showing the progression of the Arctic ice extent over the years along with later throwing out a follow-up metric (72N) for discussion and getting a rather immediate (over) reaction from the consensus crowd. I suspect what got their dander up was your off-hand remark that you do not see increasing temperatures as having a major (or was it no) effect on ice extent changes. In the meantime, poor old Kenny Fritsch attempts to initiate a discussion about some peer reviewed papers on Arctic ice extent and cannot get any responses from those of the consensus, warmists, luke warmers, skeptics or deniers. What am I doing wrong?

totosaid

CarrickGiven that there is an oscillation in the rate of ice loss (or even gain) which has a period that is roughly the same length as the temporal window he uses…. (link to graph of 10-y trends removed).

I’ll gladly accept my mistake and misunderstanding, if you promise that next time, if you don’t want people to think that you saw an oscillation in a short graph of 10y trends, you won’t claim that “there is an oscillation in the rate of ice loss” with a link to such a graph.

Robsaid

The triple point of water is 0.01 °C at 0.006 atm (about 6 millibars). FYI, we live in a world where the pressure is about 1.0 atm (about 1 bar). Thus, your use of the triple point of water is irrelevant, and whatever premises you derived from that are invalid.

so you have seen off Grzegorz and Jason and mapleleaf..do you have plans for dealing with the other buttock photocopiers? And then neven is working himself into a frenzy about polar bear habitats…I would contribute to a fund to spray the tundra with liquid nitrogen rather than have to deal with a polar bear knocking on my door for a handout.

Carricksaid

I’ll gladly accept my mistake and misunderstanding, if you promise that next time, if you don’t want people to think that you saw an oscillation in a short graph of 10y trends, you won’t claim that “there is an oscillation in the rate of ice loss” with a link to such a graph.

Deal? :p

Agreed.

With the provisos that accept that I am sane enough to know when to categorize something as an oscillation, and when I just misspoke in one sentence. (Substitute oscillation for variation, and it makes sense), and if you are wondering about my sanity in the future from something I said you provide the context that either removes all doubt or allows me to clarify what I really meant.

Do you mean #41? I didn’t even notice it was addressed to me, you changed the subject. The “we hit the average” article was about Cryosphere Today northern hemisphere sea ice timeseries, not global sea ice.

Quiet Waterssaid

Thanks for clearing that up, you didn’t disaggregate it because you didn’t see the point. Fair enough.

I have one more question if you’ll indulge me: You remove ice north of 72 degrees based on the assumption that “if you want to isolate the effect of temperature on sea ice from weather effects on North polar ice, it is counterproductive to include anything from that region”, fair enough, the hypothesis is that different processes occurring justify the masking of the area north of 72 degrees from your “global” metric. Now, compare figure 1 & 2 from your post of March 1st, then go to the previous post and compare figures 5 & 6. Would you not agree that it appears that different processes are also occurring in the Antarctic – perhaps even more different than that which led to removing North Polar ice from the metric? If so, then how do you justify not masking that region from your “global” metric, if not, how do you explain the difference in trend in the two seas?

Ok, that’s two and a bit questions but I shall leave it there. Thanks.

Kenneth Fritschsaid

“My thought is, why is it important to note that millennial-scale changes exceed those changes observed over a few decades?”

KenM have you looked at Figure 7 in that link I provided? The resolution of graph on the left for Sea_Ice > 50% (in months per year) appears to be around 130 to 150 years back in time and improves to about 50 years as you go back only 2000 years ago. You can obtain a reasonable comparison of variation in sea ice in the past versus more recent times by looking at the top of the graph that represents 500 years ago to present. If you have made that observation we can discuss further what it might mean.

I have to look again at the paper but if the points represent an average condition of sea ice for the years around that point I would think that the average would indicate even larger decadal variations.

The paper also mentions a number of mechanism that could effect sea ice extent in the Arctic that I thought might be of interest to the topic under discussion.

“My second thought was this is not so much the thread to discuss papers on the subject, so I didn’t post my first thought.:

I would think a link to and discussion of a peer reviewed paper would always be a welcome addition to a thread like this one. I tire quickly of emotional and lawyerly exchanges that in my mind merely waste band width when it comes to enlightenment.

Jeff condonsaid

You are asking reasonable questions which I cannot answer. What is different from Tamino, is that I’m willing to be wrong. I will attempt to mask some of this area and we can all find out if it changes my results. Note though, that this post is North only.

If you have any computer skills, I will send you the code I have by email and you can work on it as well. It isn’t terribly hard but it will suck up a few days. The problem I have now is that I’m incredibly busy. The other problem is that I’m more interested in moving forward. The fun of blogging here is that we simply mess with data, form opinions and express them. Unlike other forums, we disagree here as a matter of standard operation. Sometimes it gets scrappy but usually because someone with an unreasonably fixed opinion came by.

Doug cotton is a perfect example, we spent almost a thousand comments telling him where he was wrong. He’s a radiative physics “denier”, he is flat wrong, and doesn’t have a clue. So I/we fight against incorrect science on any side or get hammered for it.

Jeff condonsaid

You are sophisticated in your study and know a lot of papers by memory. Slow, careful, and informed. You are more informed than your audience and you are buried in a thread. A little narrative, a little assembly, and it is another headpost. I haven’t figured out why you (and others) don’t do the 20-40 minutes extra work to get the readership you deserve.

The blog internet needs that sort of discussion in my opinion. Curry rarely says anything solid. CA is its own brand mixed between math and impressively unbiased politics. WUWT is the popular science of climate. RC, believer only. There is nobody who has your style. It may not be quickly popular by itself but if you like you are welcome to intersperse it between these posts, you will always have readers here. If you start your own blog, I will link the articles.

Carricksaid

I’m not even bothering going over there. Tamino is even welcome to write a hit piece on me (not as good a target as you notably), and I’m afraid /ignore is all the energy I’d have for it.

On Lucias blog, Boris has been explaining how you are beyond redemption and I’m “someone who revels in assassinating the character of scientists”, I suppose because I don’t put scientists on pedestals and expect them to behave ethically.

Quiet Waterssaid

Jeff, that’s fine, after all it is only a blog post (or series) and shouldn’t be under the same scrutiny as, say, a journal paper (that said your blog does have a certain amount of traction in some quarters and perhaps has more impact there than any amount of actual science – something all bloggers should bear in mind).

The issue at the core of my line of questioning is – and it’s one that I come up against quite a lot in my line of research when discussing with statisticians – no amount of statistical, or coding, wizardry is useful when the initial assumptions made when carrying out an analysis are faulty (GIGO).

Natural and semi-natural systems are incredibly complex and any attempt to statistically model them will be a simplification – whether it is giving calculated values for forcings, deciding what weather variables are important to an organism, or leaving data out through masking. Einstein said that everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler. If you are claiming a global metric you have to be sure that the assumptions you make and rely on for determining which data to use, and leave out, are not on shaky ground otherwise you will spend a lot of time carrying out analyses that are useless. Statistical chops are no substitute for a detailed understanding of the system under scrutiny – stats is, after all a tool to aid understanding not an end point in itself.

Jeff condonsaid

That’s fine as well but I don’t think you should assume that this crowd is lacking statistical chops or the understanding of what is going on with ice. At least as well as climate science does. If this blog has science pull, it is because we don’t ‘hide’ anything.

One of my first sea ice posts, I found global sea ice was increasing. I had read all of the documentation at NSIDC at that point, taken the data from their site and added them up. Tamino spotted the mistake instantly and sent an email. After very short review, I admitted the error but was still excoriated by Tamino for trying to trick people. It turned out that the NSIDC documentation was in error and they had taken satellite data with different sized pole holes and strung only the detected ice together in a single timeseries.

The NSIDC ended up correcting their website! But Tamino never changed his commentary or post. Of course he was still mad about being wrong on PCA and being told so by Ian Jolliffe after using his name like – ask Ian if you don’t believe me. After that time, I decided not to trust anyone’s north pole timeseries where I couldn’t directly see how the hole was calculated. I still don’t trust the sat data and believe there could be a significant bias where the various satellites were knitted together. We recently found a small bias in the minimum annual ice level in regions where the ice melts completely. All of these things are useful for understanding the nature of nature.

So now we have a situation where sea ice is claimed to be mechanically pushed out of the north pole. I believed this mainstream explanation, Carrick beleived it was more related to temperature. Nathan dropped a link to a paper which does exactly what I was going to attempt, measure ice flow across drain lines. The only problem is that it isn’t up to date. We have continued to lose multi-year ice since 06-07 but the drains seem to have weakened. So I was interested to know if this could be nailed down. I’ve been looking for AVHRR surface temperature data which is up to date, and haven’t found anything online yet. I didn’t want to bother anyone from their work for it but will likely have to write emails now to get what I am looking for. I also have found some ‘flow’ data as well as windspeed but nothing as detailed as the sea ice yet. I want to overlay those on the ice video in the hopes that we can get some understanding.

These are all valid questions and fun to try and answer, and no matter the answer, I still don’t think they indicate global warming doom. I also am changing my mind to believe that my mainstream explanation may be wrong and Carrick may be right. The slight correlation difference in this post sure isn’t very convincing of the mechanical flow explanation. Unfortunately, the project is big so I won’t know much more for a while.

Jeff condonsaid

Kenneth Fritschsaid

I do not know whether this was touched upon in the thread but as I recall DeWitt Payne has on occasion talked about the climate conditions of the north and south polar areas being out of phase by about 180 degrees. I do not recall what the time scale that oscillation might be on or the source of the oscillation or even the quality of the work to arrive at that conjecture/hypothesis, but it brings to fore the issue of an average polar effect where averaging might make sense. We use global average temperatures because it easier to apply a simple(r) model to that average than it is to account for regional and particularly local variations – as important as those variation might be.

I think DeWitt made no endorsement of the poles being in opposition but he has thrown out the idea for discussion. Probably without DeWitt’s input we can google.

Kenneth Fritschsaid

Thanks, Jeff for your comments and that was not for what I was fishing, rather I was attempting to be a bit facetious. I have no delusions on writing posts that are well followed by numerous readers and with lots of comments on those posts. If I did a blog I would image it as a niche blog with maybe 10 followers that might drop off to 2 or 3 after they found out what I wanted to talk about.

Actually I learn a lot about the people doing the posting and lately through email exchanges with some climate scientists by how they respond or even fail to respond – so all is good.

Over at the Blackboard I have been attempting to obtain from Boris what it is that the consensus on AGW agrees. He feels that pushing the concept of a consensus on AGW is good marketing for immediate mitigation, yet when asked about a definition he cannot or will not supply one.

Jeff Condonsaid

Quiet Waterssaid

“That’s fine as well but I don’t think you should assume that this crowd is lacking statistical chops or the understanding of what is going on with ice.”

I hadn’t assumed anything of the sort, quite the opposite in fact – at least as far as statistical prowess goes. What I am mindful of though is the tendency many statisticians have get lost in the data and forget that the data they have are only – and can only be – a subset of the full system under study. Einstein points out that “Information is not knowledge”.

What you appear to be presenting here is what tends to happen “behind the scenes” in academia – for better or for worse – in that hypotheses are raised and rejected under minimal testing before a full paper is worked up. Unfortunately, as this is a public process here some hypotheses that, though they may later be rejected, appeal to certain of your readers and get trumpeted as findings where, if they’d actually been worked up into a paper the flaws would be too great for publication to be justified (and conversly flaws will be highlighted and disseminated if your hypotheses do not appeal).

As Pirsig alluded to, there are an almost infinite number of hypotheses to answer any scientific question and to go ahead with in-depth analysis without doing the groundwork to establish whether what you are attempting will actually answer the question posed can lead to much wasted effort – and if that is done in public that wasted effort can be (mis)used to praise or castigate the work, depending on the biases of the commenter. ANd the internet never forgets.

You state “I’ve been looking for AVHRR surface temperature data which is up to date, and haven’t found anything online yet. I didn’t want to bother anyone from their work for it but will likely have to write emails now to get what I am looking for.” Perhaps in addition to asking for the data you may want to take the time to get a qualitative assessment from those who have been working with the system for the majority of their careers (the likes of NA Rayner or even RW Reynolds – if he’s still contactable) and will have a knowledge beyond what can be gleaned from stats alone. Einstein again: “The only source of knowledge is experience”.

KenMsaid

#121
Kenneth, I looked at the paper a little more closely last night and in particular figure 7. The authors’ choice of graph technique seems common to paleo reconstruction papers I’ve read, and in my humble opinion a pain to read. Why oh why do they insist on putting time on the Y axis?
I digress. It would have been nice to see some error bars, because although they supply prediction error estimates they are not shown on the figure and the resolution of the graph is bad enough that’s difficult to figure whether any of this is significant.

And, like you, I have a bad taste in my mouth over these sorts of reconstructions in general.

With all that out of the way, I can conclude (please correct me if I’m wrong) three interesting things.
(1) This particular site in Alaska last experienced similar conditions to today’s about 3,000 years ago.
(2) A little over 1,000 years ago, the months with > 50% ice were far fewer than today, and the SST was much warmer.
(3) We appear to be at the maximum ice coverage now (!) so much much more decline should be expected in the next 1,000 years or so.

The authors also seem to lean towards mechanical causes, somewhat in direct contradiction to the recently (and frequently) cited Comiso paper. I have not read Comiso, but what I’ve gathered from comments around the blogosphere is they downplay mechanical (i.e. ocean currents) causes in the recent sea ice decline in the arctic.

Carricksaid

Jeff Condonsaid

“Perhaps in addition to asking for the data you may want to take the time to get a qualitative assessment from those who have been working with the system for the majority of their careers”

I can read the papers.

You are misconstruing your quote. If I expand on the quote you provided to more accurately portray the context: “The only source of knowledge is self experience.” A major theme here, which others will verify, is to get into the data yourself if you want to understand anything. Read, learn, work data, publish if you like and conclude as you see fit. Do it without the data and you will learn little.

Often, people believe that talking with experts leads to knowledge. I don’t agree with that philosophy. While you may learn some direction you hadn’t considered, until you do it yourself, you know very little. If I run my own Arctic drain study, I will know more than anyone who read any ten papers on it. The quality of the data, the methods, general stuff which doesn’t make it into articles. Things like this post happen all the time in universities, yet it isn’t complete enough for a journal. In climate science, the weak trend significance may be enough for someone to not include it. You might only get the Northern Hemisphere. A gravy publication.

Some people misunderstood this post series, due mostly to Tamino’s stomping fit. I have tried to clarify, some get it, others don’t. Not everyone can understand math.

“As Pirsig alluded to, there are an almost infinite number of hypotheses to answer any scientific question and to go ahead with in-depth analysis without doing the groundwork to establish whether what you are attempting will actually answer the question posed can lead to much wasted effort – and if that is done in public that wasted effort can be (mis)used to praise or castigate the work, depending on the biases of the commenter. ANd the internet never forgets.”

I think that if we are worried about “damage” to the truth, the bias in climate science itself is a far greater danger than a blog post.

Layman Lurkersaid

What you appear to be presenting here is what tends to happen “behind the scenes” in academia – for better or for worse – in that hypotheses are raised and rejected under minimal testing before a full paper is worked up. Unfortunately, as this is a public process here some hypotheses that, though they may later be rejected, appeal to certain of your readers and get trumpeted as findings where, if they’d actually been worked up into a paper the flaws would be too great for publication to be justified (and conversly flaws will be highlighted and disseminated if your hypotheses do not appeal).

Point taken. But these blog posts are a dynamic not static process. Did you follow the publication of O(10) which Jeff was co-author of? What began as blog exploration evolved into peer reviewed science – very much stimulated by the discussion threads from blog posts. The pre-mature “trumpeting” I would argue has no lasting effect unless there is substance behind it.

mack520said

David_Jaysaid

“What you appear to be presenting here is what tends to happen “behind the scenes” in academia – for better or for worse – in that hypotheses are raised and rejected under minimal testing before a full paper is worked up. Unfortunately, as this is a public process here some hypotheses that, though they may later be rejected, appeal to certain of your readers and get trumpeted as findings where, if they’d actually been worked up into a paper the flaws would be too great for publication to be justified (and conversly flaws will be highlighted and disseminated if your hypotheses do not appeal).”

So let’s see… you are telling the guy who is PUBLISHED on the topic of Polar Temperatures how the process works. Hmmmm.

Jeff Condonsaid

“What is needed IMO is more open dialog and less coaching about how to stay on message.”

I think that is one of the strengths of real time stuff on blogland. The data is going to take us wherever it does. We don’t get a lot of choice in the matter and since it is all open, people can’t really play games with the math.

RomanMsaid

There are a lot of pluses to this mode of discussion (which I have always viewed as an online seminar).

You get to hear arguments on all sides of an issue and even those who are just listening can find the situation very educational. Of course, there can be the hardcore noise makers, but after a short time, you can usually figure who has something to say and who doesn’t.

I wonder whether Quiet Waters has any views on the relative values of the Steig paper on Antarctic temperatures – a subject-matter expert – versus O’Donnell etc – non-subject-matter experts but much better mathemeticians…

D J Cottonsaid

You don’t have to do all this analysis to try to find out if carbon dioxide is having an effect. The only effect it can have is a very slight net cooling effect as it sends SW-IR from the Sun back to space. Radiated energy from the cooler regions of the atmosphere cannot be converted to thermal energy and cannot melt ice. It can only slow the radiative component of surface cooling, which is less than half the total cooling process. The other processes can compensate so there is no warming effect. But there is that slight cooling effect. More in my paper next week, but others might note my post below …

D J Cottonsaid

Jeff … The scientists who have read my 6,600 word paper prior to publication would not agree with you.

How about you wait till you read it (Monday or Tuesday) and then comment with detailed physics reasoning.

I have already demonstrated why you were wrong about lasers and microbolometers. You demonstrated I was wrong about funnels (because of etendue considerations) and I learnt from that and did not mention such in the paper: one can’t specialise in every field of physics, but it wasn’t necessary for my argument anyway.

So, without naming anyone, I have acknowledged on the last page the valuable help and information I have received from some people on these forums such as yours.

Radiation does not transfer thermal energy from cool to warm bodies. The fact that “cool” radio waves are not absorbed proves the point. Spectrometry proves the point at least for gases. I prove the point with thermodynamic scenarios.

But you have never addressed the issue of backradiation of SW-IR solar radiation captured by water vapour and sent back to space. Check out the troughs due to WV and CO2 absorption in the red and yellow graphic headed “Solar Radiation Spectrum” here … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation … and remember SW-IR has much more energy per photon than LW-IR absorbed by WV and carbon dioxide from surface radiation.

I have not disagreed with the fact that radiation from the atmosphere slows the rate of radiative energy transfer from the surface, but I do argue that no thermal energy is transferred to the surface – that’s a different process altogether, but one which is assumed by AGW proponents. My paper addresses cooling mechanisms that balance any slight warming process.

Kevin O'Neillsaid

“… to understand the trend in ice levels for the globe caused by surface temperature warming, then disambiguation of the effects is necessary. Therefore measuring ice which melts completely and re-forms annually should provide a cleaner temperature signal than a region reacting to something else.”

Rather than creating an artificial metric that has many inherent problems with it’s construction, why not simply look at ice that is generally isolated from effects other than warming – i.e., lake ice.

There are dozens of papers that have studied lake ice. Some ice-on, ice-off records extend back into the 1600’s (Lake Suwa, Japan). A journey through the literature reveals the same ‘hockey stick’ shaped graphs found elsewhere in the climate literature. At some point the fact that all these different lines of evidence reveal the same trendline should be a clue that the same thing must be driving the results – either a vast conspiracy encompassing virtually all of plant, animal, and earth scientists OR global warming.

Carricksaid

Lake ice suffers from its own problems such as land usage changes driving ice coverage. it’s just a messy problem and there aren’t any easy dodges here. And it doesn’t address the questions and issues we were delving into at the time (the relative importance of mechanical loss to temperature-driven loss).

But these presentations do offer ideas for improved ways of testing the data beyond just linear trends. Thanks for the links in any case.

Layman Lurkersaid

Rather than creating an artificial metric that has many inherent problems with it’s construction, why not simply look at ice that is generally isolated from effects other than warming – i.e., lake ice.

The lake ice would be interesting. What do you feel the “inherent problems” are with limiting to sea ice areas which exclude multi year ice?

Kevin O'Neillsaid

Personally, the assumption that weather is driving sea ice loss is non-sensical. All the research I’ve been reading indicates that sea ice loss drives the weather – not the other way around. The most recent paper laying this out was Jiping Liu, Judith A. Curry, Huijun Wang, Mirong Song, and Radley M. Horton. Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall. This follows on the work of Overland & Wang, Screen & Simmonds, Cohen & Jones, Petoukhov & Semenov, Francis et al, Jaiser et al, and more that escape my mind. Your assumption defies nearly every scientific paper I’ve read over the last five years on the subject.

Regardless, as to the proposed metric itself:

****
72N is an arbitrary demarcation line that has no inherently special physical relationship with the quantity to be measured. Why not 71? 73? 71.9? 74.58?

The proposed metric can be considered a statistical sample. As such it is not random and there is no evidence that the proposed sample is indicative of the whole now, in the past, or in the future.

The proposed metric actually ignores the most interesting/critical changes in the arctic. View a Uni-Bremen Sept 2007 icemap and calculate how much FYI the proposed metric would be ignoring. The arctic basin could become 90% ice free and the proposed metric would barely notice.

The arctic climate is heterogeneous. During the HCO beach ridges were formed on Greenland’s coasts while Ellesmere Island saw an increase in ice. There’s no reason to believe the proposed metric could capture such regional disparities.

Sea ice is mobile. Some years ice south of 72N contains significant MYI; other years it doesn’t. It is only in the last 15 years that we see little MYI south of 72N. This makes historical comparisons an illusion.

As global warming continues, the amount of ice below 72N will shrink. And shrink again. How long would this metric be useful?

What does this metric capture and display that is not already evident in one of the current measurements of global ice/ sea ice? If it’s something already captured, then why is this better than the current metric? Citing a need a for disaggregation and then aggregating NH & SH ice seems … odd. Given the intent to disaggregate, what is the justification for aggregating them?

****

I haven’t referenced back to Tamino’s discussion. I’m sure there are other problems that I haven’t covered. I haven’t addressed SH ice because I’m not even sure why the two should be linked in one metric or what the utility of it could possibly be. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land. The Antarctic is land surrounded by an ocean. The idea that the physical processes driving their respective climates might be different is hardly surprising in this context.

It appears that the ice I’ve chosen is a better indicator of NH temp than ice north of that point. Has anyone suggested doing that – using only ice north of 72N? I’m actually surprised the regression numbers are that close.

The easiest way to get NH FYI is to take the spring maximum and subtract the previous fall’s minimum. Throw in a correction for MYI transport (see numerous papers by Ron Kwok regarding transport, perhaps The Thinning of Arctic Sea Ice) and voila!

Rereading your first post – Single Year Global Sea Ice Shows Minimal Trend – you never state in the beginning what your actual goal is. It’s only at the end that you sum things up: So with that said, isn’t it interesting that global single-year sea ice has not shown a trend which is easily differentiable from noise in the past 34 years? What was the intended point?

The Antarctic sea ice at maximum encompasses an area of nearly 16 million km^2. What is the corresponding area for NH south of 72N at maximum? Have you taken these differences into account? I can’t tell from your first post if you did or not and there are no links to data anywhere in your post that I could find. Though perhaps I missed it in the comments.

Carricksaid

One more comment for Kevin: The original discussion centered around whether the dominant ice loss occurred through mechanical or thermodynamic ice loss. I believe you’re the first to describe it specifically as “weather”. I admit the thread is long enough (stretching over years now) that you might not be.

Whatever, I’ll take your comments in the spirit in which you meant them, which I’m *sure* was constructive rather than as a smary-assed know-nothing. :roll:

D J Cottonsaid

It would be best if you take up your argument with Claes Johnson if you feel there are grounds for a violation of the Second Law as it relates to thermodynamics. Claes and I are in agreement as he indicated in an email copied in another post here.

I trust you agree with Wikipedia where it says “In classical thermodynamics, the second law is a basic postulate applicable to any system involving measurable heat transfer,”

To clarify my position, below is a post I addressed to Lord Monckton, with whom I do not agree on the basics, in that he agrees with the IPCC to some extent.

Lord Monckton

As you have noted for each 1 K warming … observed evaporation rose approximately … 5.7%. This relates to the point I make when I say that evaporation (and diffusion) will compensate for any slowing of the radiative component of cooling. The only effect that radiation from a cooler atmosphere can have on the surface is to slow down the rate of thermal energy transferred by radiation to the atmosphere. But, when it does so it leaves the surface temporarily warmer and so evaporation increases, as does diffusion which is followed by convection. These processes will compensate so there is no net effect from the backradiation. Radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot transfer thermal energy to a warmer surface.

Prof Claes Johnson (see Computational Blackbody Radiation) and I are in total agreement as to the reason being that blackbodies do not convert the energy in radiation that was emitted spontaneously by a cooler source than their own temperature.

Note in passing, however, that backradiation sent to space when solar IR is absorbed does have a cooling effect, and carbon dioxide contributes to this, even though water vapour is the main player.

You need to stop accepting all the hoax about sensitivity. The figures like 255K are wrong, because that is not calculated by integration over 24 hours, taking into account rates of conduction into and out of the surface and many other factors. As you note, even if the correct figure could be calculated, it would be a weighted mean for the whole earth-plus-atmosphere system. But it is the adiabatic lapse rate (itself a function of the acceleration due to gravity) that determines the surface temperature, along with the long-established temperature gradient from the core to the surface which has established a stable approximate equilibrium point at the interface of the surface and atmosphere over the life of the Earth..

It has nothing whatsoever to do with backradiation, because as I explained above, such can have no net effect.

Jeff condonsaid

I wouldn’t bristle so much if you would address a point rather than fill threads with off-topic nonsense such as how much fizzix you know. As a little unsolicited advice, if you want to be right so bad, it does help to NOT be completely and utterly wrong.

Humorously after that last thread, you aren’t even self-consistent anymore, although you seem to be drifting back to the original dogmatic claims. Your hero Claes wouldn’t even recognize the contortions of your current argument, I have no idea how to argue with him that you are wrong, I’m guessing he would immediately agree even though he is also wrong. After the aloof lecturing we have been submitted to, I rather like the silly positions you have been forced to take in an effort to save your theory.

The Air Vent’s greatest achievement may have been to get Doug to recognize that CO2 lasers actually exist. We’re still in denial about bolometers, radiometers, walkie-talkie’s and pyrometers though. They don’t fit the result of the pet theory so they don’t exist.

Jeff condonsaid

You listed a whole bunch of stuff which doesn’t seem to make any difference. For instance – 71.9 vs 72 are the same number in this application. The difference in result would be too small to worry about and I would have thought that was pretty obvious. The reason for the cutoff is not arbitrary has been explained in detail. Your comment reads like flailing rather than a reasoned disagreement. All of the above rarely is a good approach.

“What does this metric capture and display that is not already evident in one of the current measurements of global ice/ sea ice?”

It captures the response of ice to temperature separately from the mechanical sea ice loss argument of the polar region. You know, the one from main-stream science that I agreed with and now think I/we may have been more wrong than right.

D J Cottonsaid

#163 Jeff The reason why microbolometers do not disprove the theory are explained in about 10 lines in the document.

Likewise for lasers and microwave ovens.

The microbolometer issue should be very easy to understand from posts I have already included on your site. It appears you have trouble understanding the basic physics involved, but that’s your problem not mine.

It is typical of those who just have to try to give the impression that they are right, to deliberately or otherwise misinterpret contra explanations, as you have done here. My explanation will be permanent in the published document, so I’ll just refer you to #4 and #5 in the Appendix.

My document will in fact be published on two sites, the main one “strides for the advancement of the traditional scientific method.” I am somewhat honored to learn just tonight of its acceptance on this main site.

As I have said, though not among the official reviewers, Claes Johnson has read it and totally supports it, indicating that I am one of few who understand his work. I wonder if you are. There are now six scientists who have read it (apart from ones I have shown it to here) and no one has pointed to any errors in the physics.

As I said, why not argue with Claes because his work is the foundation of mine. Though I don’t make any issue of whether or not photons are particles. If you can’t prove him wrong then you can’t prove me wrong, for his resonating concept is the only “new” hypothesis that is not yet among standard physics, but I suggest will have to be eventually.

How about you just wait till you read it. I’m quite happy to comment if you run an article on it.

D J Cottonsaid

I predict that if you do attempt to write a rebuttal, which no doubt you’re eager to do, you will inevitably lace it with irrelevant personal attacks (as in the above post) and will not address the issues one by one and argue with physics in a scientific manner. Your “rebuttal” will impress the warmists and the luke warmists like yourself, but will in no way address every issue in the 6,600 word document which is very broad in its coverage and the result of well over a thousand hours of research in the field of atmospheric physics.

You will probably also refer to past mistakes I have made (and acknowledged) and which are not at all mentioned in the document – notably funnels. You will lace your comments with innuendo and superiority because you are, after all the expert with all the letters after your name, who thus must be right because of all your experience lapping up the pseudo-science of AGW.

You will sound like a fish flapping around out of water, addressing everything but the physics. And even when you do appear to address the physics, you will assume I say things which I don’t and you will clearly demonstrate that you have not studied what I have actually written, because it’s already all in your mind. But what;s in your mind is not what’s in the 13 page document.

Jeff condonsaid

Do I need to remind you how you came here insisting you know more than everyone else? How you wouldn’t listen to any points or answer direct questions because I (and others) were not worthy of your time? Perhaps you would like to reiterate your initial thoughts on the CO2 laser, denial of bolometers existence, combined use of Johnson’s cutoff and ‘area under the curve’ physics?? Isn’t it amazing we all knew of these devices and you had to modify your theory so they could exist. How about your constantly changing position on details while continually denying that you had changed anything? You still fail to notice the complete lack of references or observational evidence for your jello-like claims.

We have changed your argument completely despite all of the nonsense, and you wonder why I don’t want to play nice anymore. I have been very patient with you. You are completely wrong in your arguments because they are at times self contradictory and cannot exist in the same universe. Of course when someone points that out, you change subjects, ignore questions and move on.

I’m sorry we broke your theory(ies) Doug but it(or they) is(or are) broken. I am curious what “the paper” has now morphed into but only in the same way one is naturally curious about a car accident.

Kevin O'Neillsaid

It captures the response of ice to temperature separately from the mechanical sea ice loss argument of the polar region. You know, the one from main-stream science that I agreed with and now think I/we may have been more wrong than right.

So, if the known effect (AGW) is not captured by your untested metric, it’s the known effect that is in question, not your metric?

I’m actually interested in the answer to whether you took the vast area differences between NH & SH sea ice areas into account and how much of the NH FYI is actually being excluded. Also, since ice is 3-dimensional, can we reasonably expect area or extent measurements to reflect it’s ‘true’ state? Wouldn’t a 3-dimensional measure (volume) capture the reality better? As I pointed out in my initial comment, what do inland lakes tell us about the global warming signal?

Each of these (and many others in the same vein) tells a story. The story is one of global warming leading to reduced sea ice. Reduced sea ice leading to regional and global circulation changes. At it’s most basic, it’s not a complicated story: Global warming and arctic amplification leads to a reduction in the latitudinal temperature gradient. This change in the temperature gradient obviously has to effect Rossby Waves (planetary waves). The effects are greater amplitude and decreased speed. In layman’s terms, weather persists for a longer duration and extremes happen more often. At the same time decreased sea ice cover leads to increased precipitation (snow) that has it’s own domino effects – not always intuitive.

If one reads, understands, and synthesizes these papers it leads to a position where it’s very difficult to accept simplistic explanations for recent events in the arctic; It’s the wind! It’s the sun! It’s the AO! It’s the NAO! It’s the PDO! etc. On a side note, ice mechanics and kinematics do play a significant role in sea ice reduction, but the effect is magnified by reduced sea ice cover; i.e., it’s a positive feedback. As the ice-pack becomes thinner and more mobile there is a greater impact from mechanics and kinematics. I found this to be quite an enlightening paper when I first read it and it remains near the top of my list of recommended readings: IPCC climate models do not capture Arctic sea ice drift acceleration: Consequences in terms of projected sea ice thinning and decline, Rampal et al, 2011

I suspect you never actually read the paper – or even the abstract. Why do I say that? Because the abstract says:

The jet results from horizontal temperature gradients in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL), set up between cold ABL‐air over the sea ice covered western Greenland Sea and the relatively warmer ABL over the ice‐free eastern Greenland Sea. From 1993 onwards we find a negative trend in THW, due to a stronger response to climate warming of the ABL over the sea ice covered ocean, compared to that over the ice free ocean.

There are other gems that can be found that undermine your position, but suffice to say that rather than supporting your position it explicitly states the increased winds are due to responses to climate warming.

RE:Recent Changes in Arctic Sea ice Motion Associated With the North Atlantic Oscillation, Ron Kwok, 2000
The ‘recent’ part of this paper is data from 1996. It is of course superseded by Kwok’s more recent work – including the paper above. Still, there is nothing in this paper that says ‘the wind’ is driving reductions in arctic sea ice. Especially not the dramatic changes witnessed in the last 8 years – since the paper was written before then. BTW, there’s a better copy of the paper Recent Changes In Arctic Sea Ice Motion Associated With the North Atlantic Oscillation than the one to which you linked.

RE: A review of sea-ice weather relationships in the Southern Hemisphere, S.F.Ackley, 1979

Here it is postulated that atmospheric forcing of the sea ice system causes changes in air-sea energy transfers that then drive the atmosphere to its own anomaly condition.

It’s old (1979), concerns the SH (which I’ve not even addressed), and supports my contention, not yours. Other than that – thanks for the link. I hadn’t read that paper previously.

RE:Response of Sea Ice to the Arctic Oscillation, Rigor et al, 2002
Again, most ‘recent’ data – 1998. Your reliance on out-of-date science causes a disconnect. It’s not the present state of knowledge. There *is* a correlation between the AO and reduced sea ice – in the 1990’s. Of course the last ten years have seen reductions in sea ice not even contemplated in the 1990s. The AO is no longer considered a driving force in sea ice reduction. The Arctic Dipole is a much more prominent factor. Chris R on his Dosbat blog has explored many of these Arctic patterns.

RE: Rapid reduction of Arctic perennial sea ice, Nghiem et al, 2007

A warming trend, increasing long-wave radiation, and Atlantic water intrusion in various regions over the Arctic Ocean have been reported [Richter-Menge et al., 2006]. These thermodynamically induced changes to the ice cover may in turn be impacting ice dynamics, with the thinner ice exhibiting enhanced motion and export by the PE. Dynamic and thermodynamic effects appear to be combining to expedite the loss of perennial sea ice.

Umm … this would, again, seem to support my position. thermodynamically induced changes to the ice cover may in turn be impacting ice dynamics..

For some reason it seems you think I’m ignorant of ice transport. I’ve read *all* of Ron Kwok’s papers – some of them multiple times. I’ve also read everything by Ignatius Rigor and have asked him questions when I’m unclear on the implications of his research. I won’t presume to speak for them, but my impression is that they would not be in agreement with your position.

Told I’m clairvoyant, I can only describe myself as a polymath who learned Natural Astrology as a child. I advanced to Judicial Astrology, interpreting Natal Horoscopes & Secondary Progressions. My expertise ranges from long-range climate/weather forecasting to economics to personal horoscope readings to the astrological world prophecies of Michel Nostradamus – all based on the principles of Mundane Astrology.

His post at WUWT is nearly incoherent, but it’s obvious he doesn’t know the difference between CFCs and the Ozone Hole vs CO2 and Global warming. What’s particularly relevant though is how many of those erudite technically literate denizens of WUWT can’t spot the idiocy.

I’ve just reread the comments in their entirety and the only voices of sanity that stood out were William Connolley and Eli Rabett. Now, are they the typical technically literate WUWT commenters you were talking about?

Steve De Mariasaid

What you need to do is write eloquent posts. What you wrote above is a defensive post, with material that have nothing to do with science.

Write a post that counters a whole post by Tamino. Leave out the bitching. If Tamino is right on some argument (which you may not phrased correctly), then acknowledge it. Accepting a mistake shows class on your side.

D J Cottonsaid

#168 & #169 You see. Exactly the type of waffle I predicted. You prejudge sight unseen. Still talking about microbolometers because you haven’t even read the post on your own site here that explains how they work and why they do not involve transfer of thermal energy from a cooler source to a warmer target. This is exactly the type of treatment you will give my paper: don’t study it, just assume it’s wrong because it comes up with a different answer from that with which you are comfortable.

It’s pretty obvious you have a vested interest, Jeff. This site is no doubt worth quite a bit now, and that value would crumble if AGW crumbles. Likewise SkS, SoD and the rest.

Here’s another email just received from one of the six scientists who have read it (names withheld)

Doug, __________,,
An endorsement from Claes like this is real praise, indeed! Congratulations to you both for all your hard work in getting this right.
Best,
_____________

D J Cottonsaid

#171 the only voices of sanity that stood out were William Connolley …..

You mean the only vooices that agreed with your belief in the AGW conjecture. William Connolley – the one who altered so many Wikipedia entries to reflect the new money-making, research-funding invention of the atmosphere greenhouse.

Jeff condonsaid

If you really believe this, then you have not followed the discussion.

“. If Tamino is right on some argument (which you may not phrased correctly), then acknowledge it. Accepting a mistake shows class on your side.”

He was wrong on many points. What should I do then? Should I admit error when Tamino is the one who made the error? Heck, he’s made several errors now. Did his followers convince you otherwise in this thread?

“We are losing the debate if we cannot stick to the point.”

There is no ‘debate’ to lose. There is only science, and if you think Tamino’s posts were eloquent, there isn’t much I can do for you.

D J Cottonsaid

#176 You see, there you go again – personal attacks without any knowledge of my “chops” if that’s a reference to IQ. I did win four academic scholarships all told if that’s any clue – how many did you win? You can still read on Wikipedia about the three main professors who inspired me to think in the field of physics. (See Acknowledgements)

How about you explain to me how a microbolometer works and why it does not depend on any conversion to thermal energy of radiation from the cooler object whose temperature it is measuring. Then do likewise for IR lasers.

Do you ever wonder why I was able to explain microbolometers and lasers when you couldn’t, and still don’t understand the mechanism it seems?

Jeff I am not denying a prior lack of knowledge in some specialised areas. (No one can know everything – I dare say I know a fair bit more about nutrition, natural medicine, Christianity and maybe photography* than yourself, as you might gauge from http://douglascotton.com ) That is one reason why I held back for many months before writing my hypothesis. Originally I was thinking of a self published book, and in fact wrote most of it, but now that this has been accepted and will be published Tuesday morning UK time – with a German translation underway I understand, there may be no need for a book. I am not seeking money and don’t get any from this. Nor do I want to be seen to be in it for the money, as perhaps you yourself might be seen.

The explanations regarding lasers, microbolometers, original IR thermometers, IR cameras, microwave ovens and radio waves are all in the Appendix of my document.

* Maybe you’ll at least like my photo on the title page, if nothing else.

Kevin O'Neillsaid

Doug, The 2nd paragraph on your website displays such a lack of knowledge of the fields of a) history b)physics and c)climate science that I really don’t want to read a 3rd or 4th paragraph – much less a full paper or a book.

Suffice to say that Jim Hansen neither coined the term ‘GreenHouse Effect’ nor did he make the calculations that showed the earth was 33 degrees warmer than we might expect otherwise. Try researching Tyndall, Fourier, and Arrhenius. You really ought to get basic facts straight. If this were a report from a 12-year old student in elementary school I could give it no higher than a D. And that might be charitable.

You really are wasting everyone’s time. I’m not saying you’re a bad person – you’re just very far out of your depth.

D J Cottonsaid

#185 I accept your point that there was some ambiguity in the second paragraph, so I have changed it to read the assumed “greenhouse effect” … so as not to perhaps imply that Hansen coined the term. However the linked article http://www.webcommentary.com/docs/jo120117.pdf at least attributes the 33 deg.C calculation to Hansen. Who cares who came up with it anyway? It’s wrong.

Fourier (1827, p. 587) rejected the comparison by stipulating the impossible condition that in order for the atmosphere to even remotely resemble the workings of a hotbox or greenhouse, layers of the air would have to solidify without affecting the air’s optical properties. What Fourier (1824, translated by Burgess, 1837, p. 12) actually wrote stands in stark contrast to Arrhenius’ claims about Fourier’s ideas

Jeff condonsaid

D J Cottonsaid

Jeff, you know I would not associate my writings with any website, journal or authors who are promulgating the AGW hoax, so you wil probably guess, and even if you don’t, I’m not giving you a flying start.

Kevin needs to learn a bit more history too. He got it wrong about Fourier. Of course I knew about Arrhenius and Tyndall, but it seems he may not have known that in 1951 the American Meteorological Society (AMS) had already condemned the GHE to the trashcan of failed theories.

Jeff condonsaid

D J Cottonsaid

And, by the way, the key issue is whether the rates of thermal energy transferred by the surface to the atmosphere by processes other than radiation (ie evaporation, diffusion) will increase enough to compensate for the slowing of the transfer by radiation. Then, if there is any net residual slowing of the total rate of transfer, whether it matters, or just extends the warmth of the day a little longer into the evening before base temperatures are reached, these being supported by thermal inertia beneath the surface, not by terrestrial heat flow, by the way.

Then the relative effect on the rate of radiative cooling by CO2 cf Wv has to be determined with empirical mearsurement, because theory indicates that each CO2 molecule would have far less effect than each WV molecule due to its limited range of frequencies.

Then the issue of backradiation to space of solar IR has to be considered, and the effect of diffusion transferring energy to CO2 and WV in the atmosphere, before being radiated to space.

So, you think Arrhenius and Tyndale has it all worked out back then, do you Kevin. History indeed!

Kevin O'Neillsaid

Doug, I said you are out of your depth. You are. Anyone conversant with the GHG theory knows the analogy to an actual greenhouse is wrong. The terminology does not describe the actual theory. As Ray Pierrehumbert states:

First, it is important to recognize what Fourier did not do in his 1827 essay. He did not say that the operation of the atmosphere is analogous to that of a greenhouse — the French word serre (greenhouse) does not appear anywhere in the essay — so he should not be blamed for the well known shortcomings of the analogy. Neither did he write down any equations describing the greenhouse effect, nor compute any estimate of planetary temperature….

Thus, the main contribution of the article is the introduction of planetary temperature as a proper object of study in physics. Fourier established the framework of energy balance still in use today: a planet obtains energy at a certain rate from various sources, and warms up until it loses heat at the same rate. Fourier correctly deduced that a planet loses heat almost exclusively by infrared radiation (“chaleur obscure”or ‘dark heat’) and can do so in a vacuum….

Fourier first made use of his earlier work on heat diffusion to correctly deduce that the internal heat remaining from the formation of the Earth no longer has a significant influence on surface temperature. He recognized that sunlight carries heat, that the atmosphere is essentially transparent to sunlight, that the light is converted to infrared on being absorbed by the surface, and that the atmosphere is relatively opaque to the infrared that serves to carry the received heat away to space. In consequence, Fourier reasoned, the temperature has to increase (compared with the no-atmosphere case) to allow sufficient infrared radiation to bring the heat budget into balance. Fourier knew that infrared flux increases with temperature,but had no notion of the form of the increase.Another fifty years were to pass before the discovery of the crucial Stefan–Boltzmann fourth-power law.

Fourier did calculate that the Earth would be far colder if it lacked an atmosphere. Tyndall discovered that some gases block infrared radiation and suggested that changes in the concentration of the gases could bring climate change. Arrhenius published the first calculations of global warming from human emissions of CO2.

D J Cottonsaid

Anyone who says, as he does “the light is converted to infrared ” doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Likewise anyone who says “the atmosphere is essentially transparent to sunlight” when even NASA energy diagrams show about 19% of solar insolation is absorbed by the atmosphere and clouds plus a further 26% reflected by these.

Why do you think Earth’s surface is much cooler in daylight hours than the Moon’s surface which gets up over 100 deg.C in its day-time?

WV and CO2 are backradiating some of the IR solar radiation to space, thus cooling. .

Indeed school children are brainwashed with such garbage as the 255K figure (based on a flat earth concept and about as inaccurate) and the 33 degree figure which ignores the adiabatic lapse rate based on the acceleration due to gravity. Yep! Get them in primary / elementary school before they understand enough physics to argue back.

It is yourself who is out of your depth. How about you respond to my paper which is the result of well over 1,000 hours of research.